Garcia Marquez's "Death Constant Beyond Love."
             Gabriel Garcia Márquez uses the technique of magical realism in his novels as well as his short stories to blend reality and fantasy so that the distinction between the two erases. Irony is the use of words and images, to convey the opposite of their intended meaning. Garcia Marquez employs irony on several levels. Sometimes just a few words suggests something totally opposite of what one would think: for example, in the village Rosal del Virrey, the only rose was being worn by Senator Onesimo Sanchez.
             The effect of irony is generally comic, but Garcia Marquez also frequently uses it to underscore a tragedy. Sanchez is a 42 year old avid reader who is going to be dead in six months and eleven days. He arrives at the village in a strawberry soda colored car, not a white or black car like one would think a prestigious man would. This particular senator had killed his first wife very brutally, buried her whole, and used her Dutch name in the local cemetery. If you stop to think about it, do you really care that he used her Dutch name? I don't.
             Sometimes a character's style of speech is ironic. For example, the senator says, "I'll be damned! The Lord does the craziest things." I don't know very many people personally who curse and speak about the Lord in the same sentence. More subtly, what the narrator or the characters say or do may sometimes contradict what the reader knows to be true. There are many examples in this short story, but the one that really stuck out in my mind was the prop trees. They were trying to create this perfect make-believe town with red-brick houses and glass windows. They tried to cover the miserable shacks, and I, as the reader, know that in real life this can't be done.
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