Loneliness and Isolation

García Márquez portrays the narrator's dream world as a place of loneliness and isolation that will not allow an intimate connection between two people who desire each other. The narrator and the woman cannot touch each other, meet in waking life, control when they see each other in dreams, nor stay together when a noise distracts them from their sleep. The narrator cannot even remember the woman when he wakes, and the woman is unsure whether she has merely dreamed her agonizing search for him. Although the dream landscape is full of desire and longing, a place for powerful and literally burning passions, the narrator and the woman cannot consummate their relationship, and they remain forever at a distance.

This sense of isolation, which is common in García Márquez's early fiction, is particularly stark in the world of...