Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers Summary

In this short short story from 1949, Garcia Marquez deals briefly with the concept of reincarnation. The narrator is an indefinite "we," whom the reader assumes must be the family and relatives of an unnamed old woman whose physical decay has left her more deranged spirit than fleshly human. Once again, the author's fascination with the netherworld between the living and the dead is on display here. The three narrators (sleepwalkers) discover the old woman early one morning, chewing desperately into the earth. They turn her over and she seems dull and lifeless, although not yet dead. The woman says she does not know how she got to the courtyard but believes it has something to do with hearing the song of a cricket trying to push the wall of her room down. The old lady explains she...