Eyes of a Blue Dog

"Eyes of a Blue Dog" is a 1950 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, whose most famous work is the novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Later anthologized in the 1972 short story collection of the same time, "Eyes of a Blue Dog" depicts a tumultuous relationship between a man and a woman all through one of its narrator's dreams.

In the story, the narrator is a man who seems to be dreaming. The man sits in a room opposite a woman and the two repeat the evocative phrase, "Eyes of a Blue Dog." The woman worries that the room they are in is not real, that someone is dreaming it. This is the reader's first strong impression that the story takes place in a dream. In addition to repeating the story's titular mantra, the woman alternates between setting her hand on an oil lamp and powdering her nose while looking at herself in a dressing room mirror. After some time, the man gets up from his seat and places his body so his back is to the woman. Despite this, he knows exactly what the woman is doing. He tells her this, and she says that's impossible.

Eventually, the man turns around and the woman takes off her clothes. She tells him that she spends her days scouring the globe for him, trying to find the narrator outside of a dream. She will know him when she finds him because he will recognize the phrase, "eyes of a blue dog." And so she utters this phrase everywhere she goes to everyone she meets. If they do meet, the woman says he should bang on her rib cage. They will echo, she says, because she believes she may be made of metal, or at least that's the way she feels.



The narrator says he always forgets the phrase in real life. Meanwhile, the woman begins to wonder whether she's actually written and spoken the phrase aloud in an attempt to find him, or if she did that in a dream as well. That's because she can't remember the name of any of the cities where she wrote the phrase down. It's cold in the room, but the woman starts to feel warmer after the narrator gives her a cigarette. The narrator wishes he could remember the phrase in real life when he wakes up. If he does, he'll be able to find the woman, he says, and everything will be alright.

The two say they've been doing this same thing, meeting in dreams, for many years. But the dream always ends when a spoon drops. The woman hides behind a lamp because she doesn't want the narrator to touch him, saying that it will "ruin" everything. The narrator abandons this line of thought because he says it is getting bright out and he must leave, which means waking up. He opens a door and smells vegetables. She says if he leaves, they won't see each other again until his next dream. The narrator says that's not true and that he will find her because this time he won't forget the phrase, "eyes of a blue dog." But the woman rejects this optimistic notion, and the story ends with her telling him: "You're the only man who doesn't remember anything of what he's dreamed after he wakes up."

Although the story doesn't seem to have a plot in a traditional sense, critics have interpreted the story to be a reflection of the narrator's failed attempts at true intimacy with a woman he loves in real life. Plot or no plot, the story is full of evocative imagery and beautiful, poetic language.