In the following excerpted essay, Davis talks about the environment of some of Garcia Marquez 's short stories, and how he uses "a heroic figure to revolutionize mundane reality."

Since the publication in 1972 of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' penultimate collection of short stories [Leaf Storm and Other Stories], critics have been hard pressed to analyze the enigmatic, fabulous tales that make up the group. Several stories are developed from the tension between the sea and the land, the latter almost always being a boring place inhabited by citizens of limited imagination. In several cases, unusual apparitions from the sea provoke traumatic explosions of imagination in one or many of the inhabitants of an otherwise staid region___

As a whole, the stories create a fabulous environment, and the Caribbean becomes as prodigious a sea as the Mediterranean was for Homer. Gradually the land areas around it become permeated with...