The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship
Writer: G. G. Marquez
SUMMARY
This story is written by applying a stream of consciousness technique. It explains how a boy deepens his observation and grows from an ordinary boy to an assertive young man.
When the story starts we find the boy is already grown into assertive man, when he asserts, “Now they are going to see who I am.” But in the very next line, we are made familiar about the past events through retrospective technique.
Four years ago in March, the boy saw a huge ship, which lost its way, crushed to rock and sank. There were no lights on the ship. Neither had it appeared in the light of the lighthouse. He could only see the ship in extreme darkness. Our common sense tells that we can see an object only if it is luminous or it is illuminated. Thus, it is clear that it was just an imagination of the boy. He was himself not sure about that vision for the first time and didn’t tell anybody about that.
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In the following March, he saw a similar ship again. This time he told his mother about it. His mother didn’t believe him. Rather, she thought the boy became lunatic and lamented for three weeks. However, she assured him that she would go and look at the ship if it came again. But before the arrival of the ship, she died.
When the ship appeared in March again, the boy called the villagers to see that ship. But as there wasn’t any ship and they beat the boy for telling lie. After that, the boy decided if the ship came next time he would show everybody how big the ship was.
The ship appeared in the fourth March too. This time the boy led the ship with a stolen lamp in a small boat. The light of the lamp helped the ship to correct its way and it followed the boy. The boy brought the ship to the village. The gigantic ship was 97 times longer than the village and 20 times taller than the church. The boy imagined that its loud siren had woken the whole village and they were looking at the ship in disbelieve. This would help him to prove his worth and who he was.
Actually it is the story about the powerful imagination of the boy. Sometimes a person’s creative power becomes so sharp that he can see his vision in concrete form. A normal mind with limited power of creativity hardly sees such a picture.
