Chapter - 9

The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Summary of the story

This story is written in the stream of consciousness style. This means that writing is not divided into sentences or paragraph. There is no full stop at the end of the sentence and no capital letter at the beginning of a new sentence. This story is one long continuous flow of ideas, thoughts and feeling as they are experienced by a person. This is a style of writing that expresses this without using a usual method of description and conversation.

‘The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship’ is a story about a boy who sees an unusual ship at night. Nobody believes the boy’s story even though the boy really can see the ship. This story is about a ship that is not real but that can be seen. The writer tries to explain the mental states of the boy and says how that imagination creates a realistic world of experience.

The main character of the story is a boy. He says that now people will believe him because they didn’t believe him in the past. He describes past events. Many years ago, he saw the ship for the first time in March at night. The ship was very big and it didn’t have any light or sound. It was moving towards the village. Something was broken in the village. Something was broken on the ship so it could not find the correct path in the water. It hit the rocks in the water, broke and sank to the bottom of the sea. Nobody heard any noise from the ship hitting the rocks and breaking.

The next day, the boy didn’t see anything unusual so he thought that he may have dreamed about the ship and it wasn’t real. Exactly one year later during the same night, he saw the same thing. This time he was sure that he wasn’t dreaming. He told his mother about the ship he had seen but she didn’t believe her son and thought he was becoming crazy or mad. His father had died 11 years ago. Since then the mother spent all her time sitting in a chair and thinking about her dead husband. Now the mother has become old and she needs to buy a new chair. She takes a small boat to go to a place, where she can buy it. The boy goes with his mother. While they are in the boy that there is no broken ship at the bottom of the sea.

The boy still believes that the ship is real and it will come next year as it has come for the past two years. The mother promises to watch the ship with her son next year. But unfortunately, that night mother dies sitting in the same chair. The people in the village think that the boy has brought this misfortune (bad chair) in the village and they throw it into the sea.

Being orphan, the boy steal fish to survive on the same night in March a few years later, the boy is watching the sea again. He finds a lot of noise to wake up the villagers to show the ship. But when the people get up, the ship has already broken and gone to the bottom of the sea. The villagers don’t find anything and they do not believe that there is a ship. They beat the boy for making a disturbance and scaring them.

One year later, on the same night in March the boy steals a small boat so that he can get near the big ship. When the ship arrives, the boy lit a lamp in his boat. The big ship sees the light on his boat and begins to follow him. The boy leads the ship towards the village. When the ship gets closer to the village it blows its a loud whistle. All the villagers wake up because of the loud noise and see the ship.