Essay on Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude. (The end of solitude, pg.4)

"La Malinche." Slave, interpreter, secretary, mistress, mother of the first "Mexican." her very name still stirs up controversy. Many Mexicans continue to revile the woman called Doña Marina by the Spaniards and La Malinche by the Aztecs, labeling her a traitor and harlot for her role as the alter-ego of Cortes as he conquered Mexico.

This way of writing is based on the “rational view of reality” versus the “acceptance of the supernatural” (Moore). Magical realism is usually associated with contemporary Latin American fiction but it is also seen in the writings of authors from different countries (Lodge 114). The unexplained fantasy in these works is used to depict “historical convulsions and … wrenching personal upheavals” that can not be otherwise described adequately in a realistic fashion (Lodge 114). One of the best known magical realism novels is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The best known magical realism short story author however, is Jorge Luis Borges. Although Latin American literature was predominantly written by males in the past, it is becoming more diverse now with the voices of females, homosexuals, and Jews.

One of the books that describes almost the whole entirety of the typical Hispanic household and the obstacles the women in the Hispanic household face would be the book written by Julia Alvarez called “How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”. The book is mainly about four Garcia sisters named Sandra, Yolanda, Carla, and Sofia which are from Dominican Republic. Alvarez starts the book by telling us what occurs currently in the sisters lives, then takes us back to their childhood. It ranges around the year 1989 to 1956, to when the book ends, but yet it was the start of the sisters lives.

Characters are made to present certain ideas that the author believes in. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold there are many characters included that range from bold, boisterous characters to minuscule, quiet characters but one thing they all have in common is that they all represent ideas. Characters in the novel convey aspects of Marquez’s Colombian culture.

The death of Prudencio Aguilar, a boastful man who claimed that the “‘rooster of [Jose] can do [Ursula] a favor,’” at the hands of Jose serves as the first parallel to religion in One Hundred Years of Solitude (21). The events that follow “[Jose] killing his neighbor, Prudencio Aguilar, a murder mirroring the first murder in the Bible, the founders of a new world civilization stop in Macondo because Jose Arcadio Buendia, like Cain before him, who was a founder of cities had dreamed of a great city” (Saldivar 33). Jose, like Cain, dreams of something greater than Riohacha; he dreams of “a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up” and the city’s name “had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo” (Marquez 24). Moreover, “there are

   One Hundred Year of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez projects itself among the most famous and ambitious works in the history of literature. Epic in scope, Marquez weaves autobiography, allegory and historical allusion to create a surprisingly coherent story line about his forebears, his descendants and ours.

In the story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez intertwines the supernatural with the natural in an amazing manner. This essay analyzes how Marquez efficiently utilizes an exceptional style and imaginative tone that requests the reader to do a self-introspection on their life regarding their responses to normal and abnormal events.

100 years of solitude is not necessarily written in chronological order. Parts of the novel may only be referred to and others are told more than once, making us feel like the sense of time turning in a series rather than a line. I think Garcia jumps from past to present, from past to present. It shows a circle pattern by which the Buendias family fall apart.

As humans, it is in our nature to make mistakes. We are not perfect and tend to make the same mistakes over and over again before we learn. We know what is right but we sometimes do not have the wisdom to choose what to do correctly. In the novel 100 years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, the author is able to invite his readers to understand human nature through a vast scope of experiences and voices. The novels spills the history of Colombia over the pages of this novel vividly. The references to Latin America and larger than life characters take us on the journey to find human’s true nature. Some would say the narrative shortcomings is the author awkward use of time. However the use of time lapse keeps the reader focus and make the story appear as if it is in dream.

In the book of 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he has a style that you see in this book with long description that may look like it goes on for a long time. The book is about the Buendía family over a century. It is the history of a family with repetitions, confusions and progressive decline. This book took place during the early nineteenth century, the novel's timeline covers the family's rise and fall from the foundation of Macondo by the tribe, José Arcadio Buendía, until the death of the last member of the line. Throughout the narrative, the fates of the Buendías and Macondo are parallel reflections. In fact, we witness the history of a people who, like the wandering tribes of Israel, are best understood in terms of their

García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many non-fiction works, but his best known for his novels “One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)” and “Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)”. His works have achieved great criticizes, most famous for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo and most of them explore the theme of solitude

In the story “A Very Old Man With Wings”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about the

Believed by many to be one of the world’s greatest writers, Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian-born author and journalist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and a pioneer of the Latin American “Boom.” Affectionately known as “Gabo” to millions of readers, he first won international fame with his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a defining classic of twentieth century literature.

In this article the writer tries to answer these questions by application of Heidegger’s notions of Being and Time but before starting to find the answers some ideas of Heidegger must be brought briefly.