One
Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of
Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad, American Spanish: [sjen ˈaɲoz ðe
soleˈðað]) is a landmark 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez
that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch,
José Arcadio Buendía, founded the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the
country of Colombia.
The magical realist
style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as
an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the
1960s and 1970s,[1] which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European
and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.
Since it was first
published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred
Years of Solitude has been translated into 37 languages and sold more than 50
million copies.[2][3][4][5] The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus,
remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works
in the Spanish literary canon.[6]
Biography
and publication
Gabriel García Márquez
was one of the four Latin American novelists first included in the literary
Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s; the other three were the Peruvian
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Argentine Julio Cortázar, and the Mexican Carlos
Fuentes. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) earned García Márquez
international fame as a novelist of the magical realism movement within Latin
American literature.[7]
As a metaphoric,
critical interpretation of Colombian history, from foundation to contemporary
nation, One Hundred Years of Solitude presents different national myths through
the story of the Buendía family,[8] whose spirit of adventure places them
amidst the important actions of Colombian historical events, such as the
Liberal political reformation of a colonial way of life, and the 19th-century
arguments for and against it; the arrival of the railway to a mountainous
country; the Thousand Days' War (Guerra de los Mil Días, 1899–1902); the
corporate hegemony of the United Fruit Company ("American Fruit
Company" in the story); the cinema; the automobile; and the military
massacre of striking workers as government–labour relations policy.[9]
Plot
The Buendia's Family
tree.
One Hundred Years of
Solitude is the story of seven generations of the Buendía Family in the town of
Macondo. The founding patriarch of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and Úrsula
Iguarán, his wife (and first cousin), leave Riohacha, Colombia, after José
Arcadio kills Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight for suggesting José Arcadio
was impotent. One night of their emigration journey, while camping on a
riverbank, José Arcadio dreams of "Macondo", a city of mirrors that
reflected the world in and about it. Upon awakening, he decides to establish
Macondo at the riverside; after days of wandering the jungle, his founding of
Macondo is utopic.[4]
José Arcadio Buendía
believes Macondo to be surrounded by water, and from that island, he invents
the world according to his perceptions.[4] Soon after its foundation, Macondo
becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events that involve the
generations of the Buendía family, who are unable or unwilling to escape their
periodic (mostly self-inflicted) misfortunes. For years the town is solitary
and unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual visit of
a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople technology such as magnets,
telescopes, and ice. The leader of the gypsies, a man named Melquíades,
maintains a close friendship with José Arcadio, who becomes increasingly
withdrawn, obsessed with investigating the mysteries of the universe presented
to him by the gypsies. Ultimately he is driven insane, speaking only in Latin,
and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years until his death.
Eventually Macondo
becomes exposed to the outside world and the government of newly independent
Colombia. A rigged election between the Conservative and Liberal parties is
held in town, inspiring Aureliano Buendía to join a civil war against the
Conservative government. He becomes an iconic revolutionary leader, fighting
for many years and surviving multiple attempts on his life, but ultimately
tires of war and signs a peace treaty with the Conservatives. Disillusioned, he
returns to Macondo and spends the rest of his life making tiny gold fish in his
workshop.
The railroad comes to
Macondo, bringing in new technology and many foreign settlers. An American
fruit company constructs a banana plantation outside the town and builds its
own segregated village across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity
that ends in tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking
plantation workers, an incident based on the Banana Massacre of 1928. José
Arcadio Segundo, the only survivor of the massacre, finds no evidence of the
massacre and the surviving townspeople refuse to believe it happened.
By the novel's end,
Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and near-abandoned state, with the only
remaining Buendías being Amaranta Úrsula and her nephew Aureliano. Aureliano's
parentage is hidden by his grandmother Fernanda, and he and Amaranta Úrsula
unknowingly begin an incestuous relationship. They have a child who bears the
tail of a pig, fulfilling the lifelong fear of the long-dead matriarch Úrsula.
Amaranta Úrsula dies in childbirth and the child is devoured by ants, leaving
Aureliano as the last member of the family. He decodes an encryption Melquíades
left behind in a manuscript generations ago. The secret message informs the
recipient of every fortune and misfortune the Buendía family's generations
lived through. As he reads the manuscript, a wind destroys all traces of
Macondo's existence.[9]
Symbolism and metaphors
A dominant theme in One
Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of
history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the
complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts.
"The ghosts are symbols of the past and the haunting nature it has over
Macondo. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact,
firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American
history".[10] "Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and
the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from
their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and
underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce
such social conditions."[10]
The fate of Macondo is
both doomed and predetermined from its very existence. "Fatalism is a
metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining
historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history
into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. The narrative
seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment
that ideology can performatively create."[10]
García Márquez uses
colours as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most frequently used and symbolize
imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic
wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction.[11]
The glass city is an
image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for
Macondo's location, but also a symbol of its fate. Higgins writes, "By the
final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo
thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise
and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of
history."[4] Images such as the glass city and the ice factory represent
how Latin America already has its history outlined and is therefore fated for
destruction.[10]
There is an underlying
pattern of Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It has been
said that the novel is one of a number of texts that "Latin American
culture has created to understand itself."[12] In this sense, the novel
can be conceived as a linear archive that narrates the story of a Latin America
discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by
the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the
foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument.
Melquíades, the keeper of the archive, represents both the whimsical and the
literary.[12] Finally, "the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a
place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary
facts become uncertain."[9]
The use of particular
historic events and characters renders One Hundred Years of Solitude an
exemplary work of magical realism, wherein the novel compresses centuries of
cause and effect whilst telling an interesting story.[8]
Characters
First generation
José Arcadio Buendía
José Arcadio Buendía is
the patriarch of the Buendía family and the founder of Macondo.[13] Buendía
leaves Riohacha, Colombia, along with his wife Úrsula Iguarán after being
haunted by the corpse of Prudencio Aguilar (a man Buendía killed in a duel),
who constantly bleeds from his wound and tries to wash it.[13] One night while
camping at the side of a river, Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named
Macondo and decides to establish the town in this location. José Arcadio
Buendía is an introspective and inquisitive man of massive strength and energy
who spends more time on his scientific pursuits than with his family. He flirts
with alchemy and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family
and community.
Úrsula Iguarán
Úrsula Iguarán is one
of the two matriarchs of the Buendía family and is wife to José Arcadio
Buendía.[13] She lives to be well over 100 years old and she oversees the
Buendía household through six of the seven generations documented in the novel.
She exhibits a very strong character and often succeeds where the men of her
family fail, for example finding a route to the outside world from Macondo.
Second generation
José Arcadio
José Arcadio Buendía's
firstborn son, José Arcadio seems to have inherited his father's headstrong,
impulsive mannerisms.[13] He eventually leaves the family to chase a Gypsy girl
and unexpectedly returns many years later as an enormous man covered in
tattoos, claiming that he's sailed the seas of the world. He marries his
adopted sister Rebeca, causing his banishment from the mansion, and he dies
from a mysterious gunshot wound, days after saving his brother from execution.
Colonel Aureliano
Buendía
José Arcadio Buendía's
second son and the first person to be born in Macondo.[13] He was thought to
have premonitions because everything he said came true.[13] He represents not
only a warrior figure but also an artist due to his ability to write poetry and
create finely crafted golden fish. During the wars he fathered 17 sons by
unknown women,[13] all named Aureliano. Four of them later begin to live in
Macondo, and in the span of several weeks all of them but one (including those
who chose not to remain in Macondo) are murdered by unknown assassins, before
any of them had reached thirty-five years of age.
Remedios Moscote
Remedios was the
youngest daughter of the town's Conservative administrator, Don Apolinar
Moscote.[13] Her most striking physical features are her beautiful skin and her
emerald-green eyes. The future Colonel Aureliano falls in love with her,
despite her extreme youth. She dies shortly after the marriage from a blood
poisoning illness during her pregnancy. Until soon before the Colonel's death,
her dolls are displayed in his bedroom.
Amaranta
The third child of José
Arcadio Buendía, Amaranta grows up as a companion of her adopted sister
Rebeca.[13] However, her feelings toward Rebeca turn sour over Pietro Crespi,
whom both sisters intensely desire in their teenage years. Amaranta dies a
lonely and virginal spinster, but comfortable in her existence after having
finally accepted what she had become.[13]
Rebeca
Rebeca is the second
cousin of Úrsula Iguaran and the orphaned child of Nicanor Ulloa and his wife
Rebeca Montiel.[13] At first she is extremely timid, refuses to speak, and has
the habits of eating earth and whitewash from the walls of the house, a
condition known as pica. She arrives carrying a canvas bag containing her
parents' bones and seems not to understand or speak Spanish. However, she
responds to questions asked by Visitación and Cataure in the Guajiro or Wayuu
language. She falls in love with and marries her adoptive brother José Arcadio
after his return from traveling the world. After his mysterious and untimely
death, she lives in seclusion for the rest of her life.
Third generation
Arcadio
Arcadio is José
Arcadio's illegitimate son by Pilar Ternera.[13] He is a schoolteacher who assumes
leadership of Macondo after Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves.[13] He becomes a
tyrannical dictator and uses his schoolchildren as his personal army and
Macondo soon becomes subject to his whims. When the Liberal forces in Macondo
fall, Arcadio is shot by a Conservative firing squad.[13]
Aureliano José
Aureliano José is the
illegitimate son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Pilar Ternera.[13] He joins
his father in several wars before deserting to return to Macondo upon hearing
that it is possible to marry one's aunt. Aureliano José is obsessed with his
aunt, Amaranta, who raised him since birth and who categorically rejects his
advances. He is eventually shot to death by a Conservative captain midway
through the wars.[13]
Santa Sofía de la
Piedad
Santa Sofía is a
beautiful virgin girl and the daughter of a shopkeeper.[13] She is hired by
Pilar Ternera to have sex with her son Arcadio, her eventual husband.[13] She
is taken in along with her children by the Buendías after Arcadio's execution.
After Úrsula's death she leaves unexpectedly, not knowing her destination.
17 Aurelianos
During his 32 civil war
campaigns, Colonel Aureliano Buendía has 17 sons by 17 different women, each
named after their father.[13] Four of these Aurelianos (A. Triste, A. Serrador,
A. Arcaya and A. Centeno) stay in Macondo and become a permanent part of the
family. Eventually, as revenge against the Colonel, all are assassinated by the
government, which identified them by the mysteriously permanent Ash Wednesday
cross on their foreheads. The only survivor of the massacre is A. Amador, who
escapes into the jungle only to be assassinated at the doorstep of his father's
house many years later.
Fourth generation
Remedios the Beauty
Remedios the Beauty is
Arcadio and Santa Sofía's first child.[13] It is said she is the most beautiful
woman ever seen in Macondo, and unintentionally causes the deaths of several
men who love or lust over her.[13] She appears to most of the town as naively
innocent, and some come to think that she is mentally delayed. However, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía believes she has inherited great lucidity: "It is as if
she's come back from twenty years of war," he said. She rejects clothing
and beauty. Too beautiful and, arguably, too wise for the world, Remedios ascends
into the sky one afternoon, while folding Fernanda's white sheet.
José Arcadio Segundo
José Arcadio Segundo is
the twin brother of Aureliano Segundo, the children of Arcadio and Santa
Sofía.[13] Úrsula believes that the two were switched in their childhood, as
José Arcadio begins to show the characteristics of the family's Aurelianos,
growing up to be pensive and quiet. He plays a major role in the banana worker
strike, and is the only survivor when the company massacres the striking
workers.[13] Afterward, he spends the rest of his days studying the parchments
of Melquíades, and tutoring the young Aureliano. He dies at the exact instant
that his twin does.[13]
Aureliano Segundo
Of the two brothers,
Aureliano Segundo is the more boisterous and impulsive, much like the José
Arcadios of the family.[13] He takes his first girlfriend Petra Cotes as his
mistress during his marriage to the beautiful and bitter Fernanda del
Carpio.[13] When living with Petra, his livestock propagate wildly, and he
indulges in unrestrained revelry. After the long rains, his fortune dries up,
and the Buendías are left almost penniless. He turns to a search for a buried
treasure, which nearly drives him to insanity. He dies of an unknown throat
illness at the same moment as his twin. During the confusion at the funeral,
the bodies are switched, and each is buried in the other's grave (highlighting
Úrsula's earlier comment that they had been switched at birth).
Fernanda del Carpio
Fernanda comes from a
ruined, aristocratic family that kept her isolated from the world.[13] She was
chosen as the most beautiful of 5,000 girls. Fernanda is brought to Macondo to
compete with Remedios for the title of Queen of the local carnival; however,
her appearance turns the carnival into a bloody confrontation. After the
fiasco, she marries Aureliano Segundo, who despite this maintains a domestic
relation with his concubine, Petra Cotes. Nevertheless, she soon takes the
leadership of the family away from the now-frail Úrsula. She manages the Buendía
affairs with an iron fist. She has three children by Aureliano Segundo: José
Arcadio; Renata Remedios, a.k.a. Meme; and Amaranta Úrsula. She remains in the
house after her husband dies, taking care of the household until her death.
Fernanda is never accepted
by anyone in the Buendía household for they regard her as an outsider, although
none of the Buendías rebel against her inflexible conservatism. Her mental and
emotional instability is revealed through her paranoia, her correspondence with
the "invisible doctors,” and her irrational behavior towards Meme's son
Aureliano, whom she tries to isolate from the whole world.
Fifth generation
Renata Remedios (a.k.a.
Meme)
Renata Remedios, or
Meme is the second child and first daughter of Fernanda and Aureliano
Segundo.[13] While she doesn't inherit Fernanda's beauty, she does have
Aureliano Segundo's love of life and natural charisma. After her mother
declares that she is to do nothing but play the clavichord, she is sent to
school where she receives her performance degree as well as academic
recognition. While she pursues the clavichord with “an inflexible discipline,”
to placate Fernanda, she also enjoys partying and exhibits the same tendency
towards excess as her father.
Meme meets and falls in
love with Mauricio Babilonia, but when Fernanda discovers their affair, she
arranges for Mauricio to be shot, claiming that he was a chicken thief. She
then takes Meme to a convent. Meme remains mute for the rest of her life,
partially because of the trauma, but also as a sign of rebellion. Several
months after arriving at the convent, she gives birth to a son, Aureliano. He
is sent to live with the Buendías. Aureliano arrives in a basket and Fernanda
is tempted to kill the child in order to avoid shame, but instead claims he is
an orphan in order to cover up her daughter's promiscuity and is forced to
"tolerate him against her will for the rest of her life because at the
moment of truth she lacked the courage to go through with her inner
determination to drown him".
José Arcadio
José Arcadio, named
after his ancestors in the Buendía tradition, follows the trend of previous
Arcadios.[13] He is raised by Úrsula, who intends for him to become Pope. He
returns from Rome without having become a priest. He spends his days pining for
Amaranta, the object of his obsession. Eventually, he discovers the treasure
Úrsula had buried under her bed, which he wastes on lavish parties and
escapades with adolescent boys. Later, he begins a tentative friendship with
Aureliano Babilonia, his nephew. José Arcadio plans to set Aureliano up in a
business and return to Rome, but is murdered in his bath by four of the
adolescent boys who ransack his house and steal his gold.
Amaranta Úrsula
Amaranta Úrsula is the
third child of Fernanda and Aureliano.[13] She displays the same
characteristics as her namesake who dies when she is only a child.[13] She
never knows that the child sent to the Buendía home is her nephew, the
illegitimate son of Meme. He becomes her best friend in childhood. She returns
home from Europe with an older husband, Gastón, who leaves her when she informs
him of her passionate affair with Aureliano. She dies of a hemorrhage after she
has given birth to the last of the Buendía line.[13]
Sixth generation
Aureliano Babilonia
(Aureliano II)
Aureliano Babilonia, or
Aureliano II, is the illegitimate child of Meme. He is hidden from everyone by
his grandmother, Fernanda. He is strikingly similar to his namesake, the
Colonel, and has the same character patterns as well. He is taciturn, silent,
and emotionally charged. He barely knows Úrsula, who dies during his childhood.
He is a friend of José Arcadio Segundo, who explains to him the true story of
the banana worker massacre.
While other members of
the family leave and return, Aureliano stays in the Buendía home. He only
ventures into the empty town after the death of Fernanda. He works to decipher
the parchments of Melquíades but stops to have an affair with his childhood
partner and the love of his life, Amaranta Úrsula, not knowing that she is his
aunt. When both she and her child die, he is able to decipher the parchments.
"...Melquíades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of
the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: 'The first
in line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants'." It is
assumed he dies in the great wind that destroys Macondo the moment he finishes
reading Melquíades' parchments.
Seventh generation
Aureliano
Aureliano is the child
of Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula.[13] He is born with a pig's tail,
as the eldest and long dead Úrsula had always feared would happen (the parents
of the child had never heard of the omen).[13] His mother dies after giving
birth to him, and, due to his grief-stricken father's negligence, he is
devoured by ants.[13]
Others
Melquíades
Melquíades is one of a
band of gypsies who visit Macondo every year in March, displaying amazing items
from around the world.[13] Melquíades sells José Arcadio Buendía several new inventions
including a pair of magnets and an alchemist's lab. Later, the gypsies report
that Melquíades died in Singapore, but he, nonetheless, returns to live with
the Buendía family,[13] stating he could not bear the solitude of death. He
stays with the Buendías and begins to write the mysterious parchments, which
are eventually translated by Aureliano Babilonia, and prophesy the House of
Buendia's end. Melquíades dies a second time from drowning in the river near
Macondo and, following a grand ceremony organized by the Buendías, is the first
individual buried in Macondo. His name echoes Melchizedek in the Old Testament,
whose source of authority as a high priest was mysterious.
Pilar Ternera
Pilar is a local woman
who sleeps with the brothers Aureliano and José Arcadio.[13] She becomes the
mother of their sons, Aureliano José and Arcadio.[13] Pilar reads the future
with cards, and every so often makes an accurate, though vague, prediction.[13]
She has close ties with the Buendias throughout the whole novel, helping them
with her card predictions. She dies some time after she turns 145 years old
(she had eventually stopped counting),[13] surviving until the very last days
of Macondo.
She plays an integral
part in the plot as she is the link between the second and the third generation
of the Buendia family. The author highlights her importance by following her
death with a declaratory "it was the end."[13]
Pietro Crespi
Pietro is a very
handsome and polite Italian musician who runs a music school.[13] He installs
the pianola in the Buendía house. He becomes engaged to Rebeca, but Amaranta,
who also loves him, manages to delay the wedding for years. When José Arcadio
and Rebeca agree to be married, Pietro begins to woo Amaranta, who is so
embittered that she cruelly rejects him. Despondent over the loss of both
sisters, he kills himself.
Petra Cotes
Petra is a dark-skinned
woman with gold-brown eyes similar to those of a panther. She is Aureliano
Segundo's mistress and the love of his life. She arrives in Macondo as a
teenager with her first husband. After her husband dies, she begins a
relationship with José Arcadio Segundo. When she meets Aureliano Segundo, she
begins a relationship with him as well, not knowing they are two different men.
After José Arcadio decides to leave her, Aureliano Segundo gets her forgiveness
and remains by her side. He continues to see her, even after his marriage. He
eventually lives with her, which greatly embitters his wife, Fernanda del
Carpio. When Aureliano and Petra make love, their animals reproduce at an
amazing rate, but their livestock is wiped out during the four years of rain.
Petra makes money by keeping the lottery alive and provides food baskets for
Fernanda and her family after the death of Aureliano Segundo.
Mr. Herbert and Mr.
Brown
Mr. Herbert is a gringo
who showed up at the Buendía house for lunch one day. After tasting the local
bananas for the first time, he arranges for a banana company to set up a
plantation in Macondo. The plantation is run by the dictatorial Jack Brown.
When José Arcadio Segundo helps arrange a workers' strike on the plantation,
the company traps the more than three thousand strikers and machine guns them
down in the town square. The banana company and the government completely cover
up the event. José Arcadio is the only one who remembers the slaughter. The
company arranges for the army to kill off any resistance, then leaves Macondo
for good. That event is likely based on the Banana massacre, that took place in
Ciénaga, Magdalena in 1928.
Mauricio Babilonia
Mauricio is a brutally
honest, generous and handsome mechanic for the banana company.[13] He is said
to be a descendant of the gypsies who visit Macondo in the early days. He has
the unusual characteristic of being constantly swarmed by yellow butterflies,
which follow even his lover for a time. Mauricio begins a romantic affair with
Meme until Fernanda discovers them and tries to end it. When Mauricio continues
to sneak into the house to see her, Fernanda has him shot, claiming he is a
chicken thief. Paralyzed and bedridden, he spends the rest of his long life in
solitude.
Gastón
Gastón is Amaranta
Úrsula's wealthy, Belgian husband. She marries him in Europe and returns to
Macondo leading him on a silk leash. Gastón is about fifteen years older than
his wife. He is an aviator and an adventurer. When he moves with Amaranta
Ursula to Macondo he thinks it is only a matter of time before she realizes
that her European ways are out of place, causing her to want to move back to Europe.
However, when he realizes his wife intends to stay in Macondo, he arranges for
his airplane to be shipped over so he can start an airmail service. The plane
is shipped to Africa by mistake. When he travels there to claim it, Amaranta
writes him of her love for Aureliano Babilonia Buendía. Gastón takes the news
in stride, only asking that they ship him his velocipede.
Gabriel García Márquez
is only a minor character in the novel but he has the distinction of bearing
the same name as the author. He is the great-great-grandson of Colonel
Gerineldo Márquez. He and Aureliano Babilonia are close friends because they
know the history of the town, which no one else believes. He leaves for Paris
after winning a contest and decides to stay there, selling old newspapers and
empty bottles. He is one of the few who is able to leave Macondo before the
town is wiped out entirely.
Major themes
“ The rise and fall, birth and death of
the mythical but intensely real Macondo, and the glories and disasters of the
wonderful Buendía family; make up an intensely brilliant chronicle of
humankind's comedies and tragedies. All the many varieties of life are captured
here: inventively, amusingly, magnetically, sadly, humorously, luminously,
truthfully.[5] ”
Subjectivity of reality
and magic realism
Critics often cite
certain works by García Márquez, such as A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and
One Hundred Years of Solitude, as exemplary of magic realism, a style of
writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as
supernatural or extraordinary. The term was coined by German art critic Franz
Roh in 1925.[14]
The novel presents a
fictional story in a fictional setting. The extraordinary events and characters
are fabricated. However, the message that García Márquez intends to deliver
explains a true history. García Márquez uses his fantastic story as an
expression of reality. "In One Hundred Years of Solitude myth and history
overlap. The myth acts as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. García
Márquez's novel can furthermore be referred to as anthropology, where truth is
found in language and myth. What is real and what is fiction are
indistinguishable. There are three main mythical elements of the novel:
classical stories alluding to foundations and origins, characters resembling
mythical heroes, and supernatural elements."[12] Magic realism is inherent
in the novel—achieved by the constant intertwining of the ordinary with the
extraordinary. This magic realism strikes at one's traditional sense of
naturalistic fiction. There is something clearly magical about the world of
Macondo. It is a state of mind as much as, or more than, a geographical place.
For example, one learns very little about its actual physical layout.
Furthermore, once in it, the reader must be prepared to meet whatever the
imagination of the author presents to him or her.[15]
García Márquez blends
the real with the magical through the use of tone and narration. By maintaining
the same tone throughout the novel, García Márquez makes the extraordinary
blend with the ordinary. His condensation of and lackadaisical manner in
describing events causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it
actually is, thereby perfectly blending the real with the magical.[16]
Reinforcing this effect is the unastonished tone in which the book is written.
This tone restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the
novel. However, it also causes the reader to call into question the limits of
reality.[9] Furthermore, maintaining the same narrator throughout the novel
familiarizes the reader with his voice and causes him or her to become
accustomed to the extraordinary events in the novel.[9]
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