The Other Side of Death Summary

Garcia Marquez takes the reader into another death-in-life experience, this time through the device of twin brothers—one dead and the other living. The narrator describes the living brother's obsession with death as he witnesses the formaldehyde preparation of his brother's corpse and reflects on the nature of decay and disintegration. The living brother describes a recurrent nightmare in which he is riding on a train and his brother pops out from behind a tree, chases the train, and signals for his brother to stop the train. But the train continues and his brother collapses on the tracks, frothing at the mouth and gasping for air. Then the narrator sees in his dream a tumor on one of his toes, removes it with a brutal screwdriver self-surgery, and pulls out a long yellow string...