Taguiba, Lawrence Vincent 2EMT

April 24, 2019 Philippine Literatures

Your Silence Speaks Volumes: A Character Analysis of Marcos in “Journey to the Edge of
the Sea” by Gregorio C. Brillantes

The short story, “Journey to the Edge of the Sea” written by Gregorio C. Brillantes
explores the thoughts of a military man with a dark past and a dilemma with his wife. The story
itself is written in a third-person omniscient point of view and delves into the thoughts of this
former soldier. The story starts with Marcos asleep in his bed and dreaming about the sea until he
is woken up by his wife who came home after a night out. The next morning, Marcos and Nina
ate breakfast while she was relaying what had happened while she was out with her friends and
after this Marcos went to work. He decided to stay overtime and so called ahead to let his wife
know. After this, the story goes to a flashback of Marcos’ past as a soldier during the Second
World War with his cousins Narding and Pepe. One memory that Marcos had was of his
commanding officer: the Colonel, and he said that, “you carry on like a damned intellectual. You
think too much.” To which Marcos replies that a man can’t help but think. The flashback reaches
a climax when, at one point, they were waiting on a submarine to arrive to give them supplies.
When the troops saw the submarine and called out to it, Marcos was stabbed by fear because of
the unbearable silence until finally the submarine answered back at last. It is then revealed at this
point in the story that Marcos was reminiscing with Narding and the Colonel. Narding and
Marcos then decide to end the night and go back to their respective families. When Marcos got
home, he saw that his wife was still not there and left her a note saying that she went out with her
friends. When Nina finally arrived, Marcos was furious with her and they argued with Marcos
hitting her and immediately regretting it. Weeks followed and Marcos grew increasingly
suspicious about her wife’s late night escapades. He decided that enough was enough and so he
secretly followed her to a club until eventually they go to a beach. Marcos pulls out his gun and
the story ends there.
 To know a character well, it is important to know what that character fears and in this
story Marcos dreads complete and utter silence. This is evident in the way he froze and was
unable to move at all when the submarine refused to answer back during his soldier days. In the
story it says, “There was no answering call, and fear stabbed him then, deep and sudden in the
marrow of his bones. It was like nothing he had experienced before; it came from the silence…”
this quote shows the primal fear that Marcos has about silence. He felt “helpless and exposed on
the ocean” as he was waiting for that submarine’s answering hail. What this shows for him as a
character is that due to this fear, he must be constantly filling the silence with noise always
seeking distractions. This is evident in the way the story itself is written as a majority of
Marcos’s experiences are relayed through flashbacks and/or past memories. This is a way of
distracting oneself from the present by looking through the past. A quote that shows Marcos
distracting himself from the silence is when he was with his cousins going on serenading trips,
“he loved to sing, although his voice, he was quick to admit, was nothing to be proud of, he
enjoyed the leisurely walks, the wide skies, the companionship.” Another way to get to know a
character well is to see what they value.

Marcos values faith, and in a more specific sense, he values the marriage that he has with
Nina. One scene that shows his love for Nina is when he is coming home from overtime. “Going
down in the elevator, he smiled inwardly at the affectionate banter he could share with her; after
the long day, he missed her and she was waiting for him.” This quote is evident that Marcos
values what he has with her wife. Furthermore, when Marcos struck Nina during their argument,
Marcos was immediately regretful: “Slowly, warily, she looked up at him in the soft-toned light,
and with sudden sick misery- what had he done?” “’I’m sorry’ he said. She lay still in the
unlighted room, not answering.” These quotations from the story show that Marcos was
extremely disappointed in himself when he hit his wife and thus shows that he truly does care
about her. What this says about him as a character is that he is a rugged husband but deep inside
he deeply loves his wife with all his heart. This makes the ending of the story all the more tragic
for Marcos.

At the end of the story, what he fears manifests itself and what he values is utterly
shattered in front of him. Since Marcos fears silence, it becomes embodied in his fevers to which
the Brillantes states, “In the mornings he awoke unrested, conscious of some loss he could not
name, as if through the night hours an unsleeping part of him had struggled for a knowledge he
must possess to be happy and it had eluded him; in the anxious fever that haunted his days, he
would find himself puzzling over the spirit of his loss.” This shows that something from his life
was missing and the uncertainty – the silence – that he was experiencing had embodied itself into
a real physical thing in his fever. Moreover, what Marcos values most (his love for his wife) has
disintegrated before his very eyes as he saw Nina being unfaithful to him. Brillantes states, “…
the wind died, and the sound of the sea faded to a murmur, and Marcos remembered the
submarine suddenly, the thrill of terror that pierced his being after he had called out, and there
was no answering voice, only the suck and swell of the waves against the black shape in the vast
unknowable darkness.” And it is in this quote that what Marcos fears most becomes reality and
what he values above all is destroyed in front of him. At this point in the story, Marcos had
endured a lot of hardship and it is no surprise that he decides to (although it was left ambiguous
and open) murder his wife’s lover. Overall, the fears and values that Marcos has defines who he
is as a person. He is a loving husband with a fear of silence that was pushed to the edge by little
things until the thing he fears most manifested itself and his values shattered.