Category: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Magic Realism, or what is known as amazing surprising realism, is a key genre found in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is defined as a style of storytelling that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magic elements. This theme is important to the novel as it employs fantasy elements such as the ability of the real character to swim in space, fly in the air, and move static objects by simply thinking about them, or with hidden powers in order to contain successive real political events, and show them in a way that amazes the reader and confuses his senses, so he cannot distinguish between what is real and what It is fictional.

In this essay, I will look at three scenes that embody magic realism. First: the existence of the village of Macondo itself, as it does not exist in reality, but rather it is a figment of the writer’s imagination. Second: imagining the birth of children with pigtails just to marry a woman from his own blood, and finally to give an ordinary drink, like chocolate, one of the priests a superpower so as to rise six inches above the level of the ground.

In this paper, I can argue that the writer combined magic and reality to create for us a literary excitement of a special kind. The creativity in the novel comes from the fact that Marquis paints a picture of events for a long period of time spanning a hundred years imagining it in a specific place in the world. The time is not real nor the place, but both could be reflections of the world map. In order to confirm the literature of magic realism, we find that the writer sometimes does not care about the determination of time and at other times it determines it with the utmost accuracy, which creates a state of pleasure for the reader that causes him to fly in the sky between reality and imagination. To proof my argument, I take this excerpt from the story “It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days”.

The spatial space of the events of the novel ‘The City of Macondo’ is the embodiment of magic realism in itself. Macondo is the legendary village where most of the literary work of the famous Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquis is revolted, an unrealistic fictional place, created by the imagination of Marquis. However, the fact that Macondo was not found on the map does not mean that it does not exist. In fact, the fictional stories that are repeated by generation after generation, along with the hustle and bustle of music and songs in the midst of intense heat, as the townspeople gather to play cards, are activities that all take place in hundreds of Colombian towns across the Caribbean region, which Each of them can be similar to a Macondo.

Macondo descends into a dictatorship. While “a hundred years of isolation” is rooted in South America, the moral and physical collapse of the village of Macondo reflects the decline of other civilizations, especially ancient Greece, and it is a warning to all of us. Modernity without morals is not progressed. The name ‘Macondo’ has entered the language of many Latin American countries as a representative example of a place where extraordinary news events happen, or for those whose birthplace is somewhat quirky. The Chilean refugees in Vienna, Austria, fleeing the rule of dictator Pinochet in the 1970s, called their asylum places ‘Macondo’. Their descendants, as well as refugees from other regimes, still live there.

The name of the city came to Colonel Aureliano Buendía in his dream when he was camping beside the river during the second civil war “He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo”.

From within the dirty world, a baby can be born with a pig’s tail. Aureliano Babilonia, who reads the notes when they were in his hands, remains alone at home with Amaranta Úrsula, who is deserted by her Belgian husband. When they remain alone, Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula, unaware of the relationship between them, fall in love and have a baby born with a pig’s tail. Amaranta dies from bleeding, and Aureliano drinks to the dregs and is caught by a former lover from the street. No one in the Buendía family would marry a woman with the same blood, because the children would be born with pig’s tails. “With any of them, your children will come out with the tail of a pig.”

A regular chocolate drink gives the priest extraordinary strength when drinking. Father (Nicanor) greedily swallows a cup of hot chocolate every time before he gets off the ground, this creates the impression of the bystanders that the simple drink has to do with the supernatural power of the priest. “Thereupon Father Nicanor rose six inches above the level of the ground”.

So, I have argued that through magical realism, the novel enables us to see an objective view of real life, embodied in the imagination of itself, and features of the unfamiliar appear in cases of similarity of fictional stories full of obsessions of the present, making room in a magical environment that alleviates social and human misery, in a way in which the magic coincides with the rigidity of reality and violence that dominates everyday life.

For over a hundred years, events and conflicts have been portrayed by Marquis in an interesting and exciting manner, through his narration, cultural background, and attitudes towards politics, love, and marriage to relatives, and as a social norm that such a marriage accompanies a fatal curse of the family itself by producing strange and distorted creatures. In addition to the manifestations of family members in Marvelous beliefs of magic and sorcery, all of which Marquez loves in the characters of his novel, and builds a world in a strange and secluded style. With the rise of the drama in the novel and the complexity of the events, until we reach the end of the novel, I was surprised that Marquis destroyed what he built. He destroyed all those characters with a devastating historical moment as if he wanted to send a message of his refusal for that style of living or he was not convinced of this model of society he built with his imagination and thought and wished It has no existence on our planet.

There is no doubt that what is meant by Macondo is to be a mirror of the reality of what is happening not only in Colombia but all over South America, which lived in isolation from the world that has kept an intermittent connection with it, only through the “Melquíades” gypsies, who invade it on the basis of wonders. Completely comparable, with beads and ornaments that always served missionaries and conquerors, but all this would have little value if Marquis had not relied on his legendary narrative style, and on all the magic that merges continuously with reality, which led to a legendary world that arose through Very expressive language.

If we do not understand things this way, it will be difficult for us to understand the novel in the way the author intended. Instead, many could accuse the writer of his style distracting ideas and lacking realism, and this, of course, is an inaccurate judgment for a novel that the author won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for it, has been translated to 46 different languages and 50 million copies out of it are already sold.

The book “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a novel that tells the story of the multi-generation of the Buendía family. The first generation were the founders of Macondo, a small town that was first isolated from the outside world in which we are first introduced to solitude, one of the first oppositions throughout the novel that plays across the story. For a long time, Macondo was in solitary, disconnected, and hidden to the outside world, although the exception was the gypsy’s who brought technology with them. The town’s solitary is the beginning of the isolation of the character’s lives throughout the novel. Then, after Macondo was exposed to the outside world we are introduced to the second opposition, death, which we see in many scenes throughout the book. Because the town is now known to the outside world we begin to see the death of various characters all the way to the end of the story. Death plays a very important role in the novel because we see it in many ways like murders, naturals deaths, and massacres.

The first death that we see in the novel is the murder of Prudencio Aguilar by Jose Arcadio Buendía, which stabs Prudencio in the throat with a spare during a rage. After committing the murder: “he never slept well after that. He was tormented by the immense desolation with which the dead man had looked at him through the rain, his deep nostalgia as he yearned for living people, the anxiety with which to soak his esparto plug. ‘he must be suffering a great deal,’ he said to Ursula. ‘You can see that he’s so very lonely”.

Although Prudencio died he came back from the dead as a ghost tormenting Jose Arcadio and his wife. Despite being tormented by the ghost the Buendía was not afraid but rather felt guilty for his death. This scene indicates the solidarity that comes with death because they feel sympathy for Prudencio that did not get to live for a long time and has come back from that lonely place just to torment them. Another that came back from the dead as a ghost was Melquiades the first person to die in Macondo, “the gypsy was inclined to stay in the town. He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude”. Although death is different from solitude by these scenes it seems like death is viewed as a form of solitude which makes the dead come back as ghosts to escape that solidarity.

Jose Arcadio Buendía is perhaps the most condemn to solidary because people thought he was insane with his inventions using technologies that Melquiades used to bring. He was punished and was sent to spend the rest of his life isolated from everyone and tied to a chestnut tree in the courtyard. When he gets back to his house, he will rather go back to being tied to the tree because he felt that being lonely was better than being with his family. He had learned to be by himself and felt more pleasant in solitary. Jose Arcadio Buendía the founder of Macondo will rather be isolated all the way through his last breath. And in his final moments, he is led to a solitary room and dies. Then, “a short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light of tiny flowers falling” as a way of grieving for his death. Nature was mourning with the rest of the family. On the other side, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was lonely from the beginning. Despite being the first baby born in the isolated town of Macondo and differences in political views, he is omitted from historical politics and military importance. As we see solitary and death keep being brought up throughout the story because either the people feel solitary and dies or after being dead they feel solidary they return. They can never escape one or the other.

Amaranta Buendía also dies but she spends her life weaving her shroud “during the day and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating solitude in that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it”. Although she did not get married or found someone to spend the rest of her life with her she focused more on the shroud. However, unlike the other character’s Death warns her to prepare herself for the afterlife. She dies as a lonely virgin deep in jealousy and hatred for her sister Rebecca. Death once again comes after solidary. Rebecca is also left alone in her house without a husband and rejected by her family. And when she is given the help she doesn’t receive it because she got used to being alone to the solitude that was placed on her since her early years.

By the end of the novel, we see the shocking death of 3,000 thousand people on the banana plantation. Jose Arcadio Segundo who also lives in solitary by the skills he acquired takes the initiative to lead a strike against the banana company. As he is the lone survivor of the strike and attempted to shed the solidary by encouraging other workers to fight for justice after the massacre he is forced to isolate himself from the town. And the town of Macondo is left empty off the face of the earth as it started, back to being that isolated and solitary place. Lastly, Aureliano reads: “before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forevermore, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”.

Many characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude experience isolation, loneliness, and without a doubt death. The terms are valued the same because of the amount of solitude and deaths that occur throughout the novel. The Buendía family is associated with both terms due to the curse of being in that lonely state or dying through generations.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has been and continues to be a phenomenal success around the world. When the novel first came out, its Argentine publisher perfected gradual sales of 10,000 copies or so, followed by a drop in interest. Instead the first printing—of 8,000 copies—sold out within one week. The novel took all of Latin America by storm, and by now has sold many millions of copies in the Spanish-speaking world alone. Earning García Márquez instant and universal fame, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into more than 30 languages worldwide. Even in Soviet Russia the novel quickly sold a million copies, causing such amazement that there is a story often cited by Garcia Márquez of “the elderly Soviet woman who copied out the entire text of the novel word by word, in order to make sure she had really read what she had read”. The novel received numerous awards, including Italy’s Chianciano Prize, the title of the best foreign book of the year in France, and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which is the most prestigious Latin American literary prize.

As one might expect, reviews were almost unanimously positive. Early Latin American reviewers called it “the best Colombian novel of all time,” “the great novel of America,” and “one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century”. In an influential review for an Argentine journal, Tomás Eloy Martínez praised the novel – “everything that occurs in One Hundred Years of Solitude is important”- but located its “one Achilles’ heel” in the great beauty of its language: “the perfect arrangement of the words sweetens the experience of reading, slows it down periodically, and finally anesthetizes our sense of taste and smell”. Writing in Spanish for Hispania, Gabriela Mora-Cruz pointed out that Márquez’s fictional world, like real life, includes everything from love to cruelty to births, deaths, violence, superstition, politics, and comedy. The novel, she concluded, for all its magical realism, reproduces the very rhythm of existence.

Like many other epics, this novel has connections with a particular people’s historical reality, in this case, the development of the Latin American country of Colombia since its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century (1810 to 1825). The seemingly endless civil war portrayed in the novel one can see as directly based on the civil wars in Columbia from 1885 to 1902, and the character of Colonel Aureliano has many affinities with General Rafael Uribe Uribe, under whom the grandfather of the author fought. Uribe’s struggles ended in 1902 with the Treaty of Neerlandia, an event in the novel. The years 1900 to 1928 saw the take over of Colombia by the United Fruit Company of Boston. The ensuing labor trouble culminated on October 7, 1928, in a mass strike of 32,000 workers. The government later sent out the troops to fight the workers, and a massacre took place in Cienaga on December 5, 1928. In addition of course, and most importantly for an understanding of the novel, is the presence in it of the author’s family and of the author himself. This point, as I shall argue later, is a key point in understanding what the political point of this epic might be.

I mention this history, not because I think one needs to know the historical facts in order to appreciate the novel, but simply to point out that One Hundred Years of Solitude, like so many other great epics, like Moby Dick, The Song of Roland, and War and Peace, takes its origin in the history, real or imagined, of a particular people.

Given this epic quality of the novel, the initial question I would like to pose is this: What qualities of life does this novel celebrate? What is the nature of the social-political vision held up here for our inspection? How are we intended to judge the people and the society of Macondo? This, I would claim, is a fairly obvious question which the novel pressures any reader to ask, as a number of critics have pointed out:

One Hundred Years of Solitude … can justly lay claim to being, perhaps, the greatest of all Latin American novels, appropriately enough, since the story of the Buendia family is obviously a metaphor for the history of the continent since Independence, that is, for the neocolonial period. More than that, though, it is also, I believe, a narrative about the myths of Latin American history.

I do not believe any other novelist has so acutely, so truthfully seen the intimate relationship between the socio-political structure of a given country and the behavior of his characters.

So what is meant to derive from the experience of the civilization depicted in the novel? One possible source of information, the author, has remained stubbornly silent on this question, refusing to debate whether or not there is a political ‘message’ in his novel. His roots with the civilization are obvious enough, for he spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a ‘steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast.’ But he has commented ‘Nothing interesting has happened to me since.’ ‘He also tells the story that his grandmother invented fantasies so that he wouldn’t be saddened by the truth of things. We will be coming back to this latter comment later on. When pressed on the subject of this novel, Marquez has said that he really wanted to write a book about incest.

If a number of readers have seen considerable political significance in the novel, there has been no agreement about what that political ‘message’ might be. The novel has attracted all sorts of conflicting political interpretations. One writer has remarked, with good justification, that there is something here for every political view: ‘[The novel’s] appeal is to all ideologies: leftists like its dealing with social struggles and its portraits of imperialism; conservatives are heartened by the corruption and/or failure of those struggles and with the sustaining role of the family; nihilists and quietists find their pessimism reconfirmed, and the apolitical hedonists find solace in all the sex and swashbuckling’.

To all of these, we might add those readers who decline to see any social-political themes in the novel and who like it because it’s a great escapist read. And whatever I might like to claim for its wider implications, One Hundred Years of Solitude is certainly a wonderful and popular read, which one can enjoy without having any particular awareness of its historical roots or its political implications. That may be the main reason why it has been such a phenomenally popular book outside Latin America: ‘The first truly international best-seller in Latin American publishing history’ (Martin 98), for which the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

The members of the Buendia family constantly find themselves feeling alone in the world, whether that solitude is physical or emotional depends on the person. For Colonel Aureliano, for a great portion of his life, his solitude was physical as he locked himself away from the world for the majority of his day to make his golden fishes (Marquez 263). This solitude is self-imposed and reflects how, after the fighting, he wants nothing more than to be left alone. For another Aureliano, the solitude he feels is emotional as, when he is younger, he does not feel a connection to the outside world and says “I have nothing to do outside” (Marquez 372). He is not interested in anything outside of the papers he reads, and that causes him to not connect with people emotionally. From this, it can be seen that much of the solitude that the Buendia family feels is self-imposed and created by the way they spend their lives. By making this family the cause of their own solitude, Marquez shows that man frequently makes life harder than really necessary. Being able to rely on people for help and being social can improve a person’s life as they have people to turn to when the real problems of life occur, but this is something the Buendia family denies themselves when they create their own solitude. By the Buendia family making their own solitude, Marquez illustrates how man has a habit of making life harder than it needs to be.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, Marquez shapes each character’s individual state of solitude through the way they choose to reminisce in their past which then reflects on their future. For Rebeca, the death of her husband, Jose Arcadio, leaves her left in the past only, “As soon as they took the body out, Rebeca closed the doors of her house and buried herself alive, covered with a thick crust of disdain that no earthly temptation was ever able to break” (Marquez 133), Rebeca chooses to only think of her friends in the past rather than recognize the present or future. Rebeca’s solitary life is created through her decision to only recognize her memories from the past which then detaches her from present reality and leaves her locked in her house. Differing from Rebeca, is Colonial Aureliano Buendia, who views life in the opposite way by forgetting the past, only to focus on the present in total confinement. Colonial Aureliano Buendia’s focused and smart manner may seem beneficial when considering his leadership role, but as a character, his lack to remember the past and focus solely on the never-ending cycle of goldsmithing and the war, leads him into his life of solitude, unable to interact with humans, “He worked all day in his workshop and Remedios would bring him a cup of black coffee in the middle of the morning” (Marquez 87), consolidating his solitary life. Through these two characters’ different abilities to interpret the past, Marquez reveals her idea on the nature of man as one who leads their life based on the way they view it, meaning their outlook on life either can lead them into a life of solitude or a life of companionship.

One Hundred Years of Solitude’s Fernanda del Carpio is described as “a woman who was lost to the world’’: [Fernanda] had been born and raised in a city six hundred miles away, a gloomy city where on ghostly nights the coaches of the viceroys still rattled through the cobbled streets. Thirty-two belfries tolled a dirge at six in the afternoon. In the manor house, which was paved with tomblike slabs, the sun was never seen. (One Hundred Years, pp. 210-11)

This representation is not idiosyncratic, but reflects regional differences in Colombia and the various attitudes of its people. Fernanda hails from the city of Bogotá, or someplace close by it in the chilly, rainy Andean region (or highlands) of Colombia. People from this region, called cachacos, are considered formal, rigid, and haughty by Colombia’s Caribbean coastal dwellers, the costeños, who include both García Márquez and the fictional residents of Macondo. In contrast to the cachacos, costeños come from a sunny, laid-back world, where the spoken language is informal, and the population more racially mixed (due, in part, to the slave trade once common in this region). García Márquez has called his first visit to Bogotá ‘’the most terrible experience in the whole of my youth/’ and the city itself “that remote and unreal city that was the centre of gravity of the power which has been imposed on us since our earliest times’’ (García Márquez in Bell-Viilada, p. 393). His unflattering portrait of Fernanda del Carpio, who “imposes the standards of a reactionary colonial culture and the observances of the most repressive form of Catholicism” on the family, clearly reflects García Márquez’s disdain for Colombia’s highland culture and his identification with his own costeño roots (Minta, p. 159).

Undertake the creation of a minor utopia: a new and limitless utopia for life wherein no one can decide for others how they are to die, where love really can be true and happiness possible, where the lineal generations of one hundred years of solitude will have at last and forever a second chance on earth. (García Márquez in McGuirk and Cardwell, p. 211)

In this light, the solitude that affects the entire Buendia line is not merely melancholic or romantic, but an expression of García Márquez’s concerns for the future of Latin America. As Stephen Minta puts it, for García Márquez solitude is

An expression of the collective isolation of Latin American people, a people for whom history has seemed a process to be endured rather than created, people divorced from a sense of history because theirs has been written by outsiders, a people condemned to a peripheral role in relation to a greater world whose limits have been defined elsewhere. (Minta, p. 31)

The Buendias’ solitude, then, is symbolic of “the inward-looking nature of their town, their culture, their continent, all locked into a permanent state of under development, unable to relate to the world outside on terms other than those of a deeply felt and crippling inferiority” (Minta, pp. 148-49).

Not only is Latin America isolated from the rest of the world, but Colombia itself is an underdeveloped country with regions geographically isolated from each other, a place in which many have remained ignorant of even the most horrifying events occurring around them. Throughout his Nobel Prize speech, entitled “The Solitude of Latin America,” García Márquez speaks of Latin America’s stormy recent past, which he sums up as a “highly unusual state of affairs,” one that includes dictatorships, wars, coups, assassinations, disappearances, genocide, imprisonments, missing children, exiles, and 20 million Latin American children dying before their second birthday (García Márquez in McGuirk and Card well, p. 209). Europeans, he says, are without the proper means of interpreting Latin Americans:

One realizes this when they insist on measuring us with the same yardstick with which they measure themselves, without recalling that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the search for one’s own identity is as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. To interpret our reality through schémas which are alien to us only has the effect of making us even more unknown, even less free, even more solitary. (García Márquez in McGuirk and Cardwell, p. 209)

Thus, the fate of the Buendia family—with its perpetual unhappiness, vulnerability, self-insulation, solitude, and eventual annihilation—represents the saddest destiny possible for the Latin American people as a whole. It is for the future of Latin America, then, that García Márquez puts forth the possibility of a second, Utopian opportunity on earth—one that will bypass the fate of his own unhappy characters.

Sources and literary context

One Hundred Years ofSolitude is usually seen as a key text of the 1960s Latin American “Boom,” a period in which Latin America’s literary output was for the first time internationally perceived to be modern, frenzied, rich, and experimental. Coinciding with the Cuban Revolution, and motivated by both impatience and despair, writers like Carlos Fuentes (see The Death of Artemio Cruz , also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times), Julio Cortázar (see Blow-Up and Other Stories) , Mario Vargas Llosa(see The Storyteller) , and José Donoso (see A House in the Country) revitalized the novel, revealing its possibilities at the same time critics were calling the novel a dead form. Novels of the Boom were notoriously self-conscious and concerned with expanding and re-evaluating traditional notions of history, narrative, truth, and reality—themes especially crucial given the ways repressive political regimes in Latin America consistently manipulated language and truth for “official” reasons.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has also been seen as the prototypical “magic realism” novel. In basic terms magic realism refers to a mode of writing that blends magical and real events without giving any special attention to the fantastic-seeming events it describes. Instead, the narrator speaks of fantastic events as if they were unsurprising, even banal, everyday occurrences. Nonetheless, García Márquez claims that every line of One Hundred Years of Solitude is based in reality. As Kathleen McNerney notes:

At first glance that might seem preposterous: yellow butterflies constantly flitting around [Meme’s lover] ; a line of blood that winds its way through town to find the mother of the victim; a young woman being assumed into heaven wrapped in expensive sheets; a man who disappears and another who returns from the dead. (McNerney, p. 19)

From a Latin American perspective, however, myth, folktale, legend, and other commonly discounted forms of nontraditional knowledge (especially usual in countries like Colombia, with its Indian and African roots) are viable aspects of a reality that could at the same time include the disappearances and genocide mentioned above, and a violent banana massacre subsequently denied by the goverment responsible for it. One Hundred Years of Solitude achieves a fusion of these nontraditional forms and linear history that was inspired by the oral abilities of Garcia Márquez’s grandmother. He set out, when crafting the novel, to replicate her storytelling skills.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

La Violencia: 1946-66

La Violencia was a chaotic 20-year period marked by violence and conflict in Colombia. Though never directly referred to in One Hundred Years of Solitude, la Violencia covers the period in which Garcia Márquez conceived of and wrote the novel, and colors the text throughout; some critics claim that, in addition to the previous century’s civil wars, la Violencia provides the background for over half the novel (de Valdés, p. 4). An estimated 250,000 people died during this 20-year period, which began with the 1946 government elections. In these elections the Liberals were split between moderate and dissident left-wing candidates. The Conservative candidate, backed by his party in full, won the presidency. In the next couple of years, there were sporadic clashes between members of the two parties—events that might have been relatively minor were it not for the April 9, 1948, assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in a crowded Bogotá street. The gunman—a fanatical Conservative—was quickly beaten to death by an angry mob. Liberals then began rioting in a “spontaneous orgy of violence”: sacking the Capitol and other official buildings, setting fire to the Conservative newspaper, looting stores, and trashing churches (Bell-Villada, p. 25). The army could do nothing in the face of such chaos. By that evening Bogota’s main district was in shambles and as many as 2,500 people had died in the course of a day that would come to be known as el bogotazo.

El bogotazo sparked political violence that spread rapidly throughout Colombia, especially in rural areas. The bloodiness of this violence was extreme: Virulent hatred quickly became a normal component of rural interparty strife. Assassinations and armed clashes were to be routinely climaxed by decapitations and castrations, drawings and quarterings, with pregnant women and whole families hacked to pieces. (Bell-Villada, p. 26)

Some gunmen achieved wide notoriety for their extreme levels of violence; Teófilo Rofas “Chispas,” for example, became famous for assassinating an average of two people every day. Land-theft became common practice in the countryside, where anyone with a gun could force a family off its own property. Some landowners retained armed bands to help them increase their holdings by stealing people’s property; in the areas where police still existed, officers often participated in these takeovers. In the end, at least 2 million peasants were forced from their homes and into the cities.

The government participated in the chaos. In 1949 Conservatives in Congress took to blowing whistles to drown out opposing voices; during one stormy session Conservative party members actually shot the Liberal who had the floor. In the same year the Conservative president, Mariano Ospina, responded to Liberal talk of his impeachment by dissolving Congress and declaring a state of siege. Ospina’s successor, Laureano Gómez, who took power in 1950, “unleashed against the Liberals a war of repression comparable to that of any military dictatorship” (Bell-Villada, p. 26). In retaliation, Liberals began killing Conservatives and torching their homes. Vast areas of the country fell into rebel hands. In this way, the state effectively collapsed.

In 1957 the period called the National Front began, under which both party leaders agreed to come together in unity. This meant an equal distribution of power between the Conservatives and Liberals—other parties, like the Communists, were ignored. There followed a period of relative calm, punctuated by intermittent acts of banditry and other violence that extended into the 1960s. The lasting effects of la Violencia have long been debated, with some arguing that they persist even today in the kidnappings and “common violent crime that affects most Colombian cities” (Oquist in Minta, p. 23).

In Latin America and other parts of the world, a person in the family (usually the father) was the head of the family, somebody who no one dared to face while the woman (the mother) is the servant or slave of the family and the house. Marquez, he tried to make sure to make that stereotype was alive. The women in One Hundred Years of Solitude are very domestic, everything exciting that happen in the novel usually around the men. The women are shown as sex tools and the men continue with curse of being obsessive. This novel is filled with sexism and how men are the only one ruling, which is something that was very common in Latin America back in the day. But the only exception is the character Ursula who is introduced as the head of the household and her husband someone whom always puts his family in danger. In the Buendia, the women run the house and men went to war and thought of sex and dreams except for again Ursula. Ursula represented the feminists in Latin America that wanted equal rights. Marquez said that he viewed women as down-to-earth and strong, “…in most cases, most women are the practical sex. It’s men who are the romantics and who go off and do all kinds of crazy things; women know that life is hard. Ursula is a prototype of that kind of practical, life-sustaining woman”.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, again the main role of a women is sex because the continuation of the lineage is portrayed as the focus for women in the novel. Further in the novel, the reader can see that sex in female is more of prostitution and their virginity and what is accepted in society. Virginity is seen as an important part of the women’s honor at a very young age, also Ursula was unwilling to let her daughter with Pietro but later she encouraged Amaranta’s marriage with Colonel Marquez, which meant that virginity was not a big thing anymore. Even though Amaranta is dying she never let Colonel Marquez touch her and that action suggests that her virginity was taking power over passion and dies with a clear conscience it’s clear that she showed her virginity with pride. Now those who are not virgin are shown as useless, Garcia Marquez he said, “the custom of sending virgins to the bedrooms of soldiers in that same way that hens are turned loose with fine rooster” (page 154), he compares the situation of when a woman loses her virginity to the way animals have sex. Prostitution is viewed as something that is always there, Pilar Ternerra as a person who had intimacy with a lot of men and not being paid for that which implies that women sometimes don’t always want people to give them money because of their body, for some women in the novel they didn’t have another chance but to turn into prostitution like a girl who burned her grandma’s house and to pay her back she started to a sell her body. Throughout the novel, again it is clear that they oversee the house and that their sexuality is something seen as bad and that only men can think about that.

In conclusion, Garcia Marquez shows the everyday life of women and their role. He showed how men never left their duties and that they’re guided by their wrong morality and that the women in the family should be admired because of how they can show how much control and power they with limited freedom.

The Implication of Magic and Myth:

Typically in a magical realism context, authors install a mythical and explicable item along with the prosaic ordinary complications. and, they hire both of them as a means of endurance in a civilization that prides itself on scientific triumphs and at the same point as a tool for surviving the deterioration of modern life. Besides, assure spirituality vanished in a march toward urban growth and turned into an abstraction of history that no longer remains (Aljohani, Fayzeh M.p 3). For example in the novel ‘one hundred years of solitude, the readers notice that father Nicanor Reyna rises about six inches above the earth after sipping a cup of chocolate, and this occurs in the novel when Gabriel García states: ‘Father Nicanor rose six inches above the level of the ground …raised his hands and the four legs of the chair all landed on the ground at the same time.'(82).(Revathi and Selvalakshmi,2018,p4).

The Reconnoitering of Identity:

Identity is commonly in a magical realism atmosphere constructed from the multi-voice of the narrator and cultural hybridity ( Fraris, Wendy B,2004,p25). It is referred to as the voice for self-testimony and paradoxically self-formulation and it is a tool of the hegemony in character’s charisma. As we discern in the novel ‘one hundred years of solitude when situations get worse in Macondo town because of the effect of the insomnia plague, families started to lose their memories which are a substantial part of their identity, and simply came as machines who follow an instruction by the colonizer to pass their daily life. Gabriel embodies this idea in this speech: ‘Where a father was remembered faintly as a dark man who had arrived at the beginning of April and the mother was remembered only as dark women who wore a gold ring on her left hand.'(Garcia,1978).(Savannah and Ajit,p2) .In this speech, the ‘Dark’ color is a symbol of no voice, no identity, no principles, and the relinquishment of the sense of nationalism.

The employment of the Term ‘Trauma’:

The essential rule of magical realism novels is to represent the misery of archaic society and history. through the experiences and memories of its people and how they torture by the colonizer and abused by violence. For example, Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson is a story of the impact of colonization on the Haisla communities in Canada and of the dreadful history which remains to haunt this Aboriginal society. This narrative method calls the reader to pay closer concern to the painful colonial experience of the Haisla individuals(Mrak, Anja,2013,p7). The narrator Castricano portrays this idea when he said:

‘For the Haisla, the ‘unspeakable’ consists of the real and material effects of the forced relocation of Aboriginal people by the government of Canada pursuant to the Indian Act; the loss of traditional land and water rights; the pollution of the environment […], and, perhaps even more insidiously, the psychological and emotional damage to Aboriginal children in residential schools where the suppression of language and culture and the outlawing of First Nations spiritual practices all manifest in emotional and spiritual trauma […]’. (802).(Mrak, Anja,2013,p7).

The questing about ‘The Rational World’:

The innovative language and the astonished tone employed by the narrator in the realm of magical realism where fantasy turns into facts, and more familiar and common facts become vague and extraordinary forge a sense of uncertainty in the notion of reality, beliefs, and tradition. ( Fraris,Wendy B,2004,p17). For instance, in ‘one hundred years of solitude, there are many chapters that illustrate Márquez’s manipulation of language and words to synthesize the truth and the mythical details in the same event to form a sense of suspicion, the death of José Arcadiobeing one of them. The Narrator states this idea when he said:

‘A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining, room table went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.’ (Márquez,1967/1996, p. 135).(Abu,p3).

The political critique :

The political critic is part of the Magical Realist function because the combination and crashing of the “magic” and the “real” are often represented as a conflict of cultures or civilizations surely, many novelists handle the settlements of Magical Realism to draft instantly about the severe political conditions under which they live. If they cannot smoothly criticize political and civil injustice, their metaphors and rhetoric serve to express their emotions. Such as in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez narrates the abuse in his own way. He says:

It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days. There were periods of drizzle during which everyone put on his full dress and a convalescent look to celebrate the clearing, but the people soon grew accustomed to interpreting the pauses as a sign of redoubled rain. The sky crumbled into a set of destructive storms and out of the north came hurricanes that scattered roofs about and knocked down walls and uprooted every last plant of the banana groves. (249)

Food: food in magical realism novels serves as a space where the inner sentiments of the characters pass on to the readers such as love, hate, pain, sadness, and happiness in a mythical sense. For instance in Like Water of The Chocolate, In the Weeding of Pedro Tita’s tiers was mixed with a cake of the wedding and this symbolizes Tita’s sadness as the narrator side: “When she finished beating the meringue, it occurred to Nacha to lick some of the icing off her finger to see if Tita’s tears had affected the flavor. (p35).

By portraying the lives of subsistence farmers in India, ‘Nectar in the Sieve’ is full of unshakable depictions of unspeakable suffering. Even in the best circumstances, Rukmani’s family has an unstable sense of security and is long enough to eat. When plagued by disease or agricultural failure, they do not have the resources to support them, and when they are expelled from the land, they have no other way of making a living. In order to cope with the disasters that continue to befall the family, Rukmani chose to treat suffering as inevitable and simple; instead of trying to avoid disasters, he focused on guiding his family through the difficulties. Kenny, a British doctor who is friends with Rukhmani, repeatedly rebuked her for this view, saying that suffering is preventable and that people should continue to fight against it. In the end, the novel believes that Rukmani and Kennyu2019s positions are valid but incomplete: Although Kennyu2019s actions often provide vital help to Rukmanni, his beliefs ensure that he despite the pain he has experienced along the way , But can still maintain inner peace.

Rukmani is an extremely stoic character, and he admits without a doubt that his life is rarely safe and often full of pain. She described frankly the events in her life, many of which made readers feel uneasy, which obviously helped her cope with these situations. For example, when she vomited in fear when she left the wedding, and Nathan was almost a stranger, she did not think of this fear, but of Nathan’s kindness to her. Later, when listening to a devastating storm destroying her familyu2019s crops, Rukmani said that she u201cunderstood a great doom that will always exist.u201d No matter how well he knew the suffering his family was about to suffer, he had no plan or hope to avoid it; instead, he was just prepared to endure it. Even when it comes to her own children, Rukmani is more willing to accept her pain rather than trying to avoid it. When her daughter Irrawaddy’s husband left her because she could not have children, Rukhmani learned that without the support of a man, Irrawaddy would become a beggar after the death of her parents. However, he said ‘people will get used to anything.’

After careful consideration, he ‘accepted Ella’s future and fate.’ When his two sons, Arjan and Thambi, who worked at the tannery, went on strike to extend rukmani, he believes that trying to change their working conditions is stupid, when ‘one person only loses and the little one does this. For Rukmani, the dominance of the rich over the poor is part of the natural order, allow yourself to adapt to this. ‘Pain is much easier than fighting with it. A rude but kind doctor, Kenny challenged Rukhmani’s belief that suffering is natural and that people can alleviate disasters that threaten them through active struggle. Kenny came to India to work for an anonymous British company, but he settled in a rural area in Rukmani Province to provide medical services to people in desperate need. Although he often looked down on his patients, he also clearly integrated into their society, providing Rukmani and many others with free medical care. Most importantly, Kenny used the funds he raised in the UK to build a hospital in the city to live up to his beliefs. At the end of the novel, the hospital is still unfinished, but it has the potential to severely alleviate the suffering of curable diseases, supporting Kenny’s argument that it is possible to counter human suffering through deliberate action.

On the contrary, when Rukmani met Kenny during the famine, she bravely assured him that the family would endure his pain until a better time comes; Kenny broke out in frustration and told her ‘You will suffer And die, the meek and suffering fool’ and advised her to ‘ask, ask for help, do something’. For Kenny, Luckmany’s refusal to fight his desperate situation is a character defect, and more broadly, a quality that hinders the progress of society as a whole. The novel refuses to explicitly acknowledge the mindset of any character and acknowledges that each character has their advantages. Although Rukhmani was skeptical of Kenny’s beliefs, she also benefited from them: Instead of accepting her infertility, she sought Kenny’s treatment and later gave birth to several children. One of the sons, Selvam, became Kenny’s apprentice and pursued an educated career that would save him from the pain and poverty of his parents’ lives. Furthermore, it is important that Kenny’s views were shaped by members of imperialist society, who were bent on fixing the world for their own interests. In contrast, the country of Rukhmani has been ruled by Great Britain for generations, so it is reasonable that its culture is full of futility in controlling external events.

Both Rukmani and Kenny were informed about their status as citizens of colonized and colonized countries. However, even though his mindset was in favor of the Rukmani family, Kenny’s constant efforts alienated him from his wife and children, and he left them in the UK. Although Rukhmani is often unable to protect her family, her tendency to accept allows her to gain inner peace and deep peace from her husband and children. Although the novel does not clearly endorse the views of these two characters, it is equally important that Rukmani’s mindset allows her to live a very difficult life, and as an old woman, with satisfaction rather than Pain to review it. Although ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ represents a large number of characters and many communities, loneliness is a characteristic that marks each character in their own way. The males of the Buendía family (especially those called Aureliano) have been repeatedly described as lonely in nature. Although the Aurelians are characterized by solitude, the characters described by Jose Arcadio have also noticed their loneliness, especially when they are with others. Although loneliness is portrayed as a destiny-determined feature, Marquez believes that more lonely characters suffer from the negative influence of the community, forcing its members to do what is expected of them, rather than making them follow their passions more honestly.

The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendía, may be the truest example of this imposing sense of community loneliness, because his natural quirks made him an outcast in the community. For example, out of curiosity and natural ambition, he tried to innovate new ways to use the technology Melchiades brought to the city, but the community thought he was crazy about these searches, and they condemned him for spending the rest of his life alone. Tied to a tree in the yard. When Jose Arcadio Buende began to speak nonsense, the citizens discovered that this further demonstrated his madness, but a priest came to visit him and revealed that the man spoke Latin. This shows that Jose Arcadio Buenda is not a madman, but a misunderstood path. When Jose Arcadio Buende (Jose Arcadio Buendía) was invited to return home at the end of his life, he preferred to return to the tree and be in the bustling house with his family.

The solitary position is more comfortable for him now. In this way, the community forced the first male in the family to live alone until he insisted on maintaining his loneliness, which set a precedent for the arrival of all males. Although the loneliness of Jose Arcadio Buende seems imposed by the community, the loneliness of other characters seems to be part of his nature. For example, Colonel Aureliano Buende was a lonely person from the beginning, and he was ‘taciturn’ even before he was born. This is appropriate because he was the first baby born in the remote town of Macondo. Despite being a lonely person, Colonel Aureliano Buendia still has a sense of community: he has been fighting for Macondo all his life, but it is in these circumstances that his community abandoned him. Through his various political evolutions, different political parties (that is, communal forms) began to reject him, even violently resist him, and eventually exile him; Despite its historical political and military importance, most of the people of Macondo have forgotten it. Jose Arcadio II, great-grandson of Jose Arcadio Buenda, was also isolated by the knowledge he possessed. When he took the initiative to lead the attack on the Banana Company, he was the only survivor of the battle, and it was amazing when he tried to share what happened during the attack. Although Jose Arcadio II tried to get rid of the loneliness of his predecessor by building a community of workers who fight for their rights, after the massacre (and its public denial), he was forced to leave the town because he could not participate in the consensus. that the massacre did not happen.

Many characters in the novel also experience isolation and loneliness, because social norms force them to fall into lonely or unattainable relationships. Aureliano’s existence is kept a secret by his grandmother because he is an illegitimate son, which isolates him from others and cultivates in his heart the desire to stay home, even if he is allowed to leave the house. Furthermore, Amaranta’s refusal to marry Colonel Pietro Crespi and Gerineldo Marquez shows that she imposes loneliness on herself and the men she rejects, which is an act of repentance and revenge. She wanted to punish herself because she might want to kill Remedios Moscot, but she also hoped that her suitor would suffer because she did not choose her earlier. Similarly, when her husband was shot to death inexplicably, Rebecca was alone at home and was severed by her family for improperly marrying his foster brother. Years later, when they offered her help, she refused because she had become accustomed to the loneliness initially imposed on her. Finally, many Buendia menu2019s lovers Pilar Ternera and Petra Cotes are still their lovers, not their wives: Buendia People keep the trick of marrying happily in unsatisfactory relationships, while secretly visiting women who love them. Not much respected by society. The men in Buendia did not do what they wanted, but abide by social standards, requiring their relationship with these women to be kept secret. Therefore, throughout the book, loneliness seems not to be determined by fate and personality, but by the community, forcing the character to leave the society, which becomes comfortable and irreversible over time.

The most prevent stereotype derived from Latin American literature is the despotic female, who is able to control and rule her household. To some degree, this portrayal is often supported by other stereotypes; for example, one can speak about female slaves and housekeepers. Gabriel García Márquez explores these images in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Females of Macondo remain exceptionally domestic in one way or another.

Many of them are mostly limited to the status of sexual objects or housekeepers. Nevertheless, they can exercise control over the domestic realm. In this essay, I will discuss the way in which Marquez portrays female characters with the help of stereotypes that reflect the role of women in Colombia. The fictional town of Macondo is governed by the gender roles established in the society. In turn, Marquez depicts a community that is proportionately dominated by women and men.

The novel presents female characters who are usually less educated than males; this is why women is primarily supposed to perform her household chores. Moreover, their opinions are not usually taken into consideration by men For instance, Ursula is the first woman that readers interact with when they read the novel. He tries to prevent her husband from purchasing gadgets from gypsies. However, her arguments are disregarded.

The author depicts women as people who are confined to domestic chores. At some point, the author shows that Ursula can assist her husband to accomplish some tasks. For instance, they are responsible for keeping the family budget. In this way, the writer shows that women were also useful in performing important duties in Macondo. Ursula is described as a person who cannot neglect her household duties. Moreover, the role of mother is an inseparable part of her identity.

This is why she says, “we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect” (Márquez 162). In fact, she tells Colonel Aureliano that, as long as she lives, she will be a great source of inspiration to her children. The assertion implies that women have the power and influence in the community.

While Ursula can influence the life of the household, Santa Sofia is described as a more subordinate figure. Unlike Ursula, who can express her opinions about different issues, Santa Sofia does not try to influence the decisions of males. One can say that she is very dutiful to everyone. She is a hardworking woman who aims at serving everyone in the household, including Fernanda. The fact that she often sleeps on a mat in the kitchen indicates that she is a very submissive person.

In fact, the author describes the character as a person who ” never seemed bothered by that lowly position”( Márquez 358). She is also shown as a sacrificing person who refuses to enjoy comfort for the sake of children who are not hers. Ursula dies at the age of 130. Unfortunately, Santa Sofia is unable to perform her duties and she leaves the family.

On the whole, the oppression of women is a part of the daily live in Macondo. Nevertheless, women are critical for the functioning of households. Thus, in this novel, the author shows how gender roles are negotiated. Yet, this negotiation usually leads to the victimization of women.

Works Cited

Marquez, Gabriel. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Ebook Library, London: Penguin UK, 2014. Print.

Marquez’s work titled “One Hundred Years of Solitude” gives an account of Buendías family, who found the isolated town of Macondo (McMurray 113). For days, the township did not get in touch with the outside world, apart from gypsies who passed by, at times, selling goodies like telescopes and ice.

The founder of the family unit, José Arcadio Buendía, was curious and inquisitive. He was, also, a head, who was extremely introverted, as he separated himself, from other people, in his obsessive inquiry into mystifying affairs (Márquez 5). Buendía’s character traits get passed on to his offspring throughout the novel. Aureliano, his younger child, inherit his extreme, mysterious focus. José Arcadio, his oldest child, inherit his physical might and impetuousness.

Ahead of establishing contacts with neighboring towns, Macondo loses its innocent state. Civil warfare begins, bringing bloodshed and fatality to calm Macondo, which, formerly, had experienced neither of them, and Aureliano becomes the head of the broadminded rebels, attaining distinction as Colonel Aureliano Buendía.

Also, Macondo changes to a township permanently linked to the outside humanity through the disgrace of Colonel Buendía, during and after the warfare (Wood 7). At one point, Arcadio rules authoritatively and finally becomes shot by gun men. Later on, a mayor gets chosen, and his supremacy remains calm until another civil rebellion gets him killed. The civil warfare ends with the signing of a peaceful accord, subsequent to the demise of Arcadio.

Marquez’s work, in the novel, is realistic in spite of its magical and fantasy aspects. The novel covers the happenings of a whole century. Hence, much of her work revolves around the actual events, such as, work, births, deaths and marriages of the Buendía lineage.

Marquez does not shy away from the portrayal of sex and brutality, although she is a woman. She portrays a number of the Buendía men as sexually promiscuous, through explaining how they frequent brothels (Márquez 198). Other men get portrayed as brutal and introverted. Such men apt to stay indoors, as they make minute golden fish (Márquez 199).

Besides, Marquez portrays the sexual promiscuity of ladies through Meme, who once takes home seventy-two of her friends from boarding school, and Fernanda Del Carpio, who get dressed in a unique nightdress with a hole at the crotch, when she consummates her matrimony with her spouse (Wood 34).

Marquez, also, tackles social and political matters with confidence. She explains the exceptional realism of a Latin America that became trapped between industrialism and modernity, and, also, devastated by civil war and imperialism.

In this setting, what might or else appear unbelievable begins to appear real both to the author and to the reader. Marquez explains how her homeland saw a mass execution much like the mass murder of the employees in Macondo. The mass murder of the employees occurred after capitalism penetrated Macondo.

The Americans established a banana plantation, in Macondo, and constructed fenced settlements, inside the plantation. Americans possessed the land of the community and further, exploited workers, who provided labor in the plantation (Márquez 79). As a result, the banana plantation workers decided to put their tools down (Márquez 82). Many of them were mass executed by the army, which sided with the Americans, who owned the plantation.

This incidence demonstrates that Márquez does fear to expose the mistreatment of the Macondo people by the Americans. Besides, Márquez portrays the image of a family through Ursula Iguarán. Ursula Iguarán works loyally to keep the family unit as one regardless of its differences. However, the the Buendía family, as well as, the entire town of Macondo becomes influenced by modernity, which disregards some moral aspects, such as marriage.

Also, García Márquez’s reconstructs and confines horror and beauty of the country, using her encounters in Latin America, into the novel (McMurray 115). Hence, the novel blends indigenous Latin American fairy tale and real happening to create a novel with a sense of real life. Also, the novel is receptive to the fascination that religion and myths inculcate into the globe.

Thus, Márquez’s work is realistic because it stresses on unity between fantasies and the truth. For instance, she argues that magic is real and powerful, which is a common belief among most people. Hence, she tells people what rhymes with their existing knowledge. Thus, the general tendency of the narrative is factual, with events represented candidly, as if they occurred.

The novel One Hundred Years of Solitude include both modernity and tradition. Modern expertise and culture, together with the capitalism linked with them, often weaken Macondo “the entry of the train reduces the town to mayhem” (McMurray 115). Thus, modernity drivers are shocking, to the Buendía relatives and the entire Macondo society (Wood 78).

Tradition, in García Márquez’s work, becomes seen as a source of wisdom and comfort, and, also, a basis of the narrative’s formal inspiration. Marquez work has an immense impact to the native Latin American folkloric and legendary civilization. However, the partition amid modernity and tradition is not fairly easy.

For example, the ethical policies assumed by the narrative’s most esteemed characters are not traditional standards but are rather quite progressive. For example, Aureliano Segundo receives an incentive for having an affair with Petra Cotes, outside matrimony (Wood 78). Conservative Catholicism becomes regarded as oppressive, as the narrative’s own account of modern moral codes reigns.

Lastly, certain elements of the novel’s plot become related to the Bible. The novel begins with two characters in an unsophisticated region of the globe, a globe so novel that several items do not have names for identification. These Characters can be compared to Eve and Adam, in the Bible, since they represent descendants who fill the earth and introduce pain and death, in the world (Márquez 37). When the monstrous mass murder occurs, in which three thousand people lose their lives, the region experiences rain for almost half a decade.

This demonstrates purification of the world using water, similar to the event of Noah, in the Bible, when God sent water to cleanse the earth. Also, the novel ends with massive destruction of the world. The community becomes introverted and secluded, again (Márquez 412). The small number of existing Buendía kin members turns in upon themselves incestuously, separated from the outside humanity and destined to an introverted ending.

In addition to the aforementioned elements of the plot, stylistic traits of the work make the book act in a manner that can be compared to the Bible (McMurray 114). Buendía, in the last part of the novel, interprets a set of prehistoric prophecies and discovers that all the happenings became prophesied.

The prophecy said that life of the community and its residents became predetermined. Similarly, Melquíades predicts the whole course of happenings, although the difference between Melquíades’ prophesies and the real text, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is unclear (McMurray 114). From this perspective, the narrative resembles the Bible, which is a book of prophesies. However, prophesies of the novel do not essentially work for the inhabitants of Macondo as the Bible does for persons who read it.

This is because the novel seems to be indistinguishable with Melquíades’ prophesies, which became written in Sanskrit language. Hence, persons who live in Macondo cannot use Melquíades’ prophesies to forecast events in the future, as Márquez’s work is accessible only to Aureliano, who decodes the work. Hence, when weighed against Biblical prophesies, prophesies in the novel are unattainable to persons who require them most.

In conclusion, Marquez’s work, in the novel, is realistic in spite of its magical and fantasy aspects. The general tendency of the narrative is factual, with events represented candidly, as if they occurred. Besides, the novel embraces both modernity and tradition. Tradition, in García Márquez’s work, is a source of wisdom and comfort, as well as, a source of motivation for the work.

Lastly, several elements in the novel can be related to the Bible. For instance, the two characters at the start of the novel, similar to Eve and Adam, represent descendants who fill the earth and introduce pain and death, in the world. Also, the novel contains some prophecies, thus, resembling the Bible, which is a book of prophesies. Márquez’s novel, to suffice it all, can be argued from different perspectives.

Works Cited

Márquez, García. One Hundred Years of Solitude, London: HarperCollins, 1967.Print.

McMurray, George. Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez, Boston: Hall & Company, 1987.Print.

Wood, Michael. Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.Print.