A Summary and Analysis of ‘Dialogue with the Mirror’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Dialogue with the Mirror’ is a 1949 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Published when he was just twenty-two years old, it is an early work written when Márquez was still finding his way towards his mature style.

In the story, a man looks at himself in the mirror one morning as he prepares to shave before work. The largely plotless story concentrates on what goes through the man’s mind as he shaves himself, cutting himself slightly in the process.

Summary

The story describes a man in front of the mirror, and the thoughts and dreams he has while he stands there. He itemises the various things – a shave, a bath, breakfast – which he has to complete before he leaves the house to go to work, allowing himself a specified number of minutes for each activity.

We follow his train of thought as he tries unsuccessfully to remember the name of a local shop which sells provisions, hardware, medicine, and other items, but all he can recall with certainty is that it is owned by someone named Mabel and its name begins with a letter P. Briefly, as he looks into the mirror, he sees the image of his dead twin brother.

He fills the basin with hot water. When the cloud of water vapour disappears from the surface of the mirror, he sees his reflection in the mirror and sticks out his tongue, watching as his reflection does the same back at him. Noticing his tongue is yellow, he diagnoses that his reflection – and therefore he himself – has an upset stomach. When he smiles, he notices an air of falseness and artificiality in his smile as it’s reflected back at him.

He experiences an almost childish glee as he lathers his face with soap suds ready to shave. But realising he is in danger of running behind schedule, he starts to speed up. The smell of food cooking in the kitchen downstairs makes him salivate as he shaves. When he catches sight of his elbow in the mirror, he has the thought that someone is trying to hang his (dead) brother. In his rush to finish shaving on time, he cuts himself.

He can only see the cut in the mirror, and when he feels his face for the nick on his skin, he cannot locate it. Looking at his reflection, he notes how worried he now looks. He begins to speculate that he is ahead of the figure in the mirror, who was not ready for the shaving stroke that ended up cutting him.

When he cleans his face with water and dries his face with a towel, he notices the bloody cut on the face of the figure in the mirror. Suddenly, he remembers the name of Mabel’s shop: Pandora. He smiles at having recalled the name at last, and he feels so pleased with himself, it’s as if a dog has started wagging its tail inside his soul.

Analysis

‘Dialogue with the Mirror’ is narrated by a third-person narrator, although Márquez utilises free indirect style to bring us closer to the character’s state of mind. This decision is worth pondering. Why did Márquez not have the unnamed character narrate his own thoughts and observations?

One answer to this question is that having the character narrate his own thoughts and actions for such a mundane and everyday event as shaving would risk the charge of narcissism or indulgence. There is nothing inherently extraordinary about the protagonist of the story, nor even about any of the things he does in ‘Dialogue with the Mirror’. Third-person narration keeps the man at a distance, so we can observe him from the outside, as it were, much as he observes himself as an external presence via his reflection in the mirror.

Indeed, many of us will be able to identify with the idea of seeing our reflection in the mirror as a kind of uncanny double: something Sigmund Freud explored in his psychoanalytical essays, and which Nicholas Royle, in his book The Uncanny, devotes an especially illuminating chapter to. In short, the double unnerves us because it is both us and not us, alien and familiar, a part of us and yet strange or foreign.

Márquez brings this point home with the mention of the man’s dead brother: in seeing a resemblance between his own tired face and that of his deceased twin, a bridge between past and present, the living and the dead, is formed. When the man cuts himself shaving, he can see his mirror image is bleeding but fails to locate the same wound on himself.

The Epiphany

Many modernist short stories end not with some exciting plot denouement but with a little revelation which the protagonist experiences. This revelation is known as an epiphany. In a largely plotless story, a plot twist or reveal would be impossible, or at least difficult, to pull off convincingly.

In ‘Dialogue with the Mirror’, the man’s epiphany, if it can be so called, is his sudden ability to recollect the name of Pandora, the store run by Mabel, which he passes on the way to work.

This is, of course, such a small and pointless detail to remember, that Márquez almost turns the story into an absurdist vignette by having this as the epiphanic climax to his story. But of course, it is not the man’s sudden ability to recall the name of the store that matters, so much as it is the concatenation of different sensory experiences – completing his shave, albeit having cut himself; the smell of the kidneys cooking downstairs; and the solution to the piece of everyday trivia which had temporarily slipped his mind – which gives him an animalistic joy at the end of the story.

Final Thoughts

Mathematical language pervades the story: geometry, theorem, velocity, and other related terms. The mathematician, Márquez tells us, vies with the artist or the aesthete as the man looks at himself in the mirror and shaves. Scientific precision is required to execute the perfect close shave, but this desire is complemented by – but also, to an extent, in conflict with – the aesthetic impulse, or the notion that shaving is as much an art as it is a scientific procedure.

There is something bathetic, almost comical, about describing something as mundane and everyday as shaving in such terms, and in the language of mathematics. Many modernist short stories focus on the ordinary and seemingly insignificant daily things we do, but once again Márquez verges on absurdism with the language he uses to describe the man’s shave.