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The Village Women
The village men play the role of the skeptic in the story. While the village men are out inquiring about missing men to try to figure out who the drowned man is, the village women invent a sympathetic personality for the drowned man. When the men return, they are distrustful of the women, who seem far too concerned with the treatment of what was previously “a piece of cold Wednesday meat.” The men are convinced, however, when the women reveal the man’s face—in it, they see the drowned man’s sincerity, which enables the villagers to celebrate the drowned man with an immense quantity of flowers and plan to transform their dwellings. Having overcome their skepticism, then, the men help in the town’s renewal.
The Village Men Quotes in The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
The The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World quotes below are all either spoken by The Village Men or refer to The Village Men. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
Quotes
When they laid him on the floor they said he’d been taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him in the house, but they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men.
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They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desertlike cape.
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They only had to take the handkerchief off his face to see that he was ashamed, that it was not his fault that he was so big or so heavy or so handsome […]. There was so much truth in his manner that even the most mistrustful men, […] even they and others who were harder still shuddered in the marrow of their bones at Esteban's sincerity.
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At the final moment it pained them to return him to the waters as an orphan and they chose a father and mother from among the best people, and aunts and uncles and cousins, so that through him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen.
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While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became aware for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man.
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The Village Men Character Timeline in The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
The timeline below shows where the character The Village Men appears in The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
...for an afternoon before someone notices the body and alerts the rest of the village. The men of the village who carry the drowned man to the nearest house say that he...
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...stranger, since it is easy to see that everyone from the village is present. The village men leave to see if any of the neighboring villages are missing a man, while the...
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The men return from their nighttime trips to other nearby villages with the news that the drowned...
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The men are immediately struck by Esteban’s beauty and by the obliging, humble nature suggested by his...
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