Comparing Haddaway's Death And Transfiguration Of A Teacher

To answer, Haddaway’s question, love is compassion, at least according three prominent authors magical realism in Latin American literature. These authors are Maria Teresa Solari, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar. Magical realism is a style of writing that combines fantasy into the real world. A metaphor is a figure of speech that applies a word to an object where it is not literally applicable. In the individual stories of these authors and Latin American literature, love serves as a metaphor for compassion.

Maria Teresa Solari is the author of the short story “Death and Transfiguration of a Teacher”. In this story, a group of students murder and cannibalize their teacher because of her love for poetry and her lack of conformity. It

may seem absurd to find compassion within such a grisly act, yet it is there. Before the girls kill her, one of them recites a poem. “One girl got up and recited one of Becquer’s poems from beginning to end”. It may have a semblance of facetiousness, but the teacher lived and died trying to teach the students poetry. In the following sentences it says, “She died with beatific smile on her face”. The students, maybe inadvertently, showed her compassion in her last moments. Later on in the story,compassion can be distinguished from the parents of the butchers. Though they share familial bonds, even murder can snap ties. When the school council is deciding whether to go public or not many parents shows compassion to the well-being of the children. “More than one father during that long session embarked on a rambling disquisition on how damaging it would be to interrupt or perhaps end his his daughter’s studies”. The parents want to best for their children and are sympathetic to their situation.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the author of “An Old Man with Enormous Wings”. In this story and old, frail man with wings washes ashore the property of Pelayo and Elisenda. Throughout the story, they merely tolerate him and show contempt towards him. Despite odds, the old man miraculously recovers his vitality and flies away. With nothing but cruelty and mistreatment, the rare acts of compassion are easy to find in this story. For example, “...and before the child got his second teeth he’d go inside the chicken coup to play, where the wires were falling”. The child is aware of the old man’s status, but does not treat him with disdain. Instead, he shows him compassion and plays in his living quarters to exhibit his lack of convention and show that the old man is as much a person as he is. Furthermore, it may seem cruel at first but in the beginning of the story, Pelayo and Elisenda are palpable to compassion too. “Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas”. This was in lieu of clubbing him to death, as their neighbor suggested. It should be seen as a ‘mercy kill’, like putting a terminal dog down. Also, Pelayo and Elisenda thought her spoke a foreign sailor tongue, so they may have thought he would be at peace in the sea.