Journey to the Seed

 In the short story of Journey to the Seed by Alejo Carpentier, the story was about a man named Marcial. It starts at the end of his life while he is on his death bed. "Don Marcial, Marquis of Capellanías lay on his deathbed, his breast clad with metal, and with an escort of four candles with long beards of melted wax" (Alejo Carpentier, Journey to the Seed). The story travels backward from his deathbed to when he was younger and born. This story was confusing at first to understand, but once you understood the order of the story it made much more sense. It was interesting to see a story written this way because it gave the reader a new and different perspective of your life. It discusses the parties and dances with the girls he had, and his relationship with his wife. It also talks about how he had to sell everything and his social class drops as well. It was interesting to read what he did in the past after you already read about how he turned out. The quote "The world of ideas was slowly becoming empty" (Alejo Carpentier, Journey to the Seed). The more that the story travels backward Marcial's knowledge slowly becomes less and less as the story continues. By the end of the story, Marcial says that he only feels hunger, thirst, heat, pain, and cold. This is when he is very young and this is all that he knows at this point in life. So it was very interesting to see and undertsand a person from when they were on their deathbed to when they were born. It gives you a differet perspective. 

Comments

  1. Lena CorradoOctober 4, 2020 at 7:49 AM

    The different perspective you mentioned is, in my opinion, the whole purpose of this story. The magical realism, the literary mechanism in which we are able to travel back in time as an outside observer, is tactful in our understanding of Don Marcial. We have the luxury of peeling back the many layers that compose humanity and human thought, using Marcial as our guinea pig so to speak. It's easy to assert or able someone as this or that. "Journey to the Seed" explores this more in depth as the author presents justification and explanation to not only the highs of life, but applies this to his faults as well.

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  2. Ian MillerOctober 5, 2020 at 6:53 AM

    I found "Journey to the Seed" to be incredibly interesting. The concept of reliving life backwards, then into nothing fascinates me, and I believe it highlights the idea and tone of Caribbean literature. It shows that even though there is a renewed sense of life, there is ultimately no happy ending. Marcial realizes how lonely he was in revisiting all of his memories, and he finds that all of his troubles were numerous and most likely outweigh his positive moments.

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