A Summary and Analysis of ‘Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers’ is a 1949 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Published when he was just twenty-two years old, it is one of his earliest stories. It’s also one of his shortest, running to just four pages.

Narrated by the three sleepwalkers of the title, the story recounts how a woman fell from a second-storey window and, thereafter, retreated into herself, becoming a kind of living corpse. The story is a bleak exploration of a life without purpose or meaning, in which a character wills herself to disappear while still living.

Summary

The story is told either by one of the three sleepwalkers (on behalf of himself and the other two) or by all three, adopting a collective voice (as this is a Gabriel García Márquez story, the latter is perfectly possible).

The story concerns a woman (who probably lives with the three men) who has been withdrawn and isolated for a number of years. The woman tells the three sleepwalkers that she will never smile again, and they believe her. She has taken to sitting on the cold floor in a dark corner, alone.

The narrator confides that the three of them (are they brothers to the woman, or even her sons?) lack the courage to want her to be released from her life and slip away into death. Instead, they want to keep her in this ‘glacial’ state of suspension or death-in-life.

The narrator recalls the night some years ago when the woman fell out of a second-storey window and landed on the courtyard outside with her face in the earth. They had lifted her up and the men had observed how her organs seemed ‘loose’, as if she were a ‘lukewarm corpse’ before rigor mortis sets in.

The woman is unable to recall how she ended up out in the courtyard, but she mentions hearing a cricket chirping as if it were about to demolish the wall of her room. One night, she fell asleep leaning against the wall, because she was convinced the cricket was on the other side, trying to knock it down. Another time, she told them that she had seen this cricket inside the glass of her mirror, and that it had come through the glass to get to her. The men responded by trying to rid the house of all insects.

The narrator recalls that, before she announced she would never smile again, the woman had told them she would no longer wander around the house. She had previously walked from room to room at all hours, for many months, and the men would hear her moving about at night.

After announcing she would just sit down on the ground and remain there, she did exactly that, and had remained there ever since. The men are left wishing that they could hear her weep again, if only so they could pretend that it was the cry of a newborn baby who represented the woman reincarnated into a new body.

Analysis

Many of the early short stories of Gabriel García Márquez bear the influence of modernist writers, and of Franz Kafka, although there are also Faulknerian touches detectable in ‘Bitterness of Three Sleepwalkers’. The story is elliptical in its details: we do not know what the relationship is between the three men and the woman.

All we are told for sure is that she is older than they are. The narrator makes a reference to her being ‘surrounded by healthy sons’, but whether this means that he and his fellow ‘sleepwalkers’ are the woman’s children, or whether it is a mere turn of phrase, is difficult to establish from the text.

We also know that this woman is prone to both aural and visual hallucinations, which centre on the cricket which she hears – and believes is trying to knock down the wall of her room – and sees in the mirror, believing it has escaped from the glass to reach her. Like the other details in the story, the meaning of these hallucinations remains ambiguous, unclear. Has the woman been driven mad by a lack of sleep? She, too, is prone to somnambulism, since the narrator tells us he often heard her wandering from room to room at night.

Fundamentally, we cannot be sure what trauma lurks in the woman’s past which might have caused this gradual withdrawal from the world, until she is immobile, unsmiling, and barely alive. It’s perhaps tempting to interpret the story as some sort of allegory for dementia, and to view the woman as the men’s elderly mother who has retreated into her own world because she can no longer clearly recognise or engage with the world around her.

The narrator’s remark that he and the other men lacked the ‘courage’ to long for her to find release in death might lend credence to such a reading, and the notion that they cannot bring themselves to will the woman to die, regardless of how little of her appears to remain fully living, and how much she mentally longs to die.

Symbolism

Earth is an important symbol in this story. When the woman falls onto the earth, she comes up with a mouthful of dirt which, the narrator remarks, must already have ‘had a taste of sepulchral sediment for her’: she has literally had a foretaste of death.

The cricket is another symbol which carries significance in ‘Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers’. Here, the insect suggests something trying to communicate with the woman, as if the creature is perhaps a harbinger of death or a visitor from some other world trying to reach her. It is suggestive, of course, that the woman believes she sees it in her mirror: it is as if the cricket represents some ‘voice’ within herself, some other self trying to talk to her, but whether it is her former self trying to resurrect her (in some cultures, crickets are associated with both death and resurrection) or her future self trying to pull her closer to death.

The other time the cricket is mentioned, the woman is convinced it is trying to break down her wall. Is this wall the barrier or threshold separating life from death? We cannot be sure; Márquez lends the story a deliberately ambiguous quality, so we are forced to provide, or at least propose, our own answers to these questions, but the story is silent on them.