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 narrative, he seems to be inside a dream about a bar with an outdoor dance floor where birds are strolling. The attention to the bar’s structural details parallels the level of detail used to describe the cage: “Balthazar was in a lighted room where there were little tables, each with four chairs, and an outdoor dance floor, where the plovers were walking around” (156). Earlier in the text, Balthazar boasts that the cage’s bars have been soldered from inside: “It’s the strongest wire you can find, and each joint is soldered outside and in,” (151). This again alludes to the fanciful image of Balthazar working on the cage from inside it, both the creator of his prison and a prisoner within it.

The cage also repeatedly connects to childhood, children, and Pepe Montiel. When Dr. Giraldo arrives to see about the cage, there are children already inspecting it: “[A]pproaching the table [...] children surrounded [Balthazar]” (151). The order for the cage was placed by a child, Pepe Montiel, leading to the story’s main dramatic confrontation between Balthazar and Pepe’s father. García Márquez even frames Pepe within the bars of the cage, just as Balthazar is repeatedly framed within it: “The child jumped up, embraced the cage, which was almost as big as he was, and stood looking at Balthazar through the wire work [...]” (155). In this sense, the cage links Pepe and Balthazar against José Montiel, who calls the cage “furniture” first, then a “trinket,” before shouting at Balthazar to take the cage away. Not merely disinterested in the cage, the elder Montiel finds it, and its many unseen dimensions, threatening.