No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories Summary
Gabriel García Márquez

No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories Overview

This collection of short writings (one novella and several short stories) explores several experiences of living under oppression. Some of the stories look at situations and actions of people striving to hold onto hope in an unhappy world and/or circumstances that seem impossible to escape, while others look at the lives and experiences of people whose losses form a personal kind of oppression that seems even more painful than that imposed by the state, as it is in a number of the stories. Death and namelessness are two other common themes in the collection which contains, at times, glimpses of a kind of magic that, it seems, can infuse even the bleakest life.