Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon

The cage symbolizes the system of economic disparity that the townspeople and Balthazar exist within. At the time he wrote “Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon” in 1962, García Márquez worked for a Cuban newspaper called Prensa. The short story’s concerns with unfair wages, the struggle for art to survive in an economic system, and the value of time, suggest that García Márquez used the image of the cage to encapsulate anti-capitalist critique. At no point does the cage contain birds or serve any utilitarian purpose. Instead, the cage takes on a series of abstract meanings for each character who comments on it.

Among its many meanings, the cage represents Balthazar’s artistic passion, creativity, and dreams, and serves as a vehicle for Marquez’s trademark magical realism. The cage has a fanciful power over those who see it. Balthazar has always made cages and this one may be his best, a marvel that captures the imagination of the townspeople. The imagery that describes the cage gives it a dream-like significance, as the narrator likens it to both an exact architectural design and to a scale model. The cage means so much to Balthazar that at the end of the