One Hundred Years of Solitude magical realism

One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendía Family through seven eras in the town of Macondo. The founding patriarchs of Macondo, Ursula Iguarán and Buendía, leave Riohacha, Colombia, in search of a better life and a new home. Buendía dreams with Macondo, a town of mirrors that reflected the world in and around it, one night during their journey while lying on a riverbank. As he awakens, he decides to establish Macondo by the side of the river, after a long time of meandering across the wilderness. Buendía’s establishment of Macondo is utopic. Buendía, the founding patriarch, believes Macondo is surrounded by space, and from that island, he creates the world according to his perceptions. Soon after its establishment, Macondo turns into a town frequented by irregular and phenomenal occasions that include the eras of the Buendía family. At last, a hurricane pulverizes Macondo, the town of mirrors. Toward the finish of the story, a Buendía man disentangles an encryption that generations of Buendía family men had neglected to unravel.

The Theme of Magical Realism

The theme of Magical Realism is the specialty of captivating something that in this present world would not be conceivable to be credible. It is altogether different from the magical children’s story, where things are very shocking, extraordinary, and overdone. Rather, magical realism makes magic appear to be more otherworldly and standard. In the story One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author utilizes Magical Realism to portray how individuals manage their self-made solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does good work of consolidating the genuinely stunning magical with regular day to day existence, so that magic in Macondo appears to be ordinary (Bloom 46). Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to some extent, is fruitful in Magical Realism since he makes conventional occasions phenomenal, and that makes them ordinary.

Magic and Realism in Harmony

Despite the fact that the magic and the realism that One Hundred Years of Solitude incorporates appears at first to be contrary, they are, actually, superbly reconcilable. Both are fundamental keeping in mind the end goal to pass on Marquez’s specific origination of the world. Marquez’s novel reflects reality not as it is experienced by one onlooker, but rather as it is independently experienced by those with various foundations (Bloom 48). These various points of view are particularly fitting to the one of a kind reality of Latin America-gotten between pre-industrialization and modernity, torn by civil war, and desolated by colonialism where the experiences of individuals shift a great deal more than they may in a more homogenous society. Supernatural authenticity passes on a reality that joins the magic that illusion and religion mix into the world.

The Blurring of Reality and Fiction

This novel treats scriptural accounts and local Latin American mythology as truly valid. This approach may come from the sense, shared by some Latin authors, that vital and effective strains of magic going through normal lives fall victim to the Western accentuation on rationale and reason. On the off chance that Garcia Marquez appears to confound reality and fiction, it is simply because, from a few points of view, fiction might be more genuine than reality, and the other way around. For example, in spots like Marquez’s main residence, which saw a massacre much like that of the laborers in Macondo, unbelievable repulsions might be a typical sight. Genuine living, then, starts to appear like a dream that is both frightening and interesting, and Marquez’s novel is an endeavor to reproduce and to catch that feeling of genuine living (Bloom 49).

The Political Context of the Novel

The politically charged brutality of Colombia’s history is paralleled in Colonel Aureliano Buendía who takes up arms against the Preservationist who are encouraging the ascent of outside radicals to go for power. The well off of the banana plantation set up their own particular tyrannical police drive. The utilization of genuine occasions and Colombian history by Garcia Marquez makes One Hundred Years of Solitude a fantastic case of magical realism (Bloom 51). Not only are the occasions of the story an intertwining of reality and fiction, however the novel entirely tells the historical backdrop of Colombia from a basic point of view. Along these lines, the novel packs a few centuries of Latin American history into a sensible content.

The Repetition of History

The unavoidable and unpreventable repetition of history is additionally predominant in Macondo. The heroes are controlled by their past and the intricacy of time. All through the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. This ghosts are images of the past and the eerie nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the uprooted reiteration that they bring out are, actually, immovably grounded in the specific advancement of Latin American history (Bloom 52). Ideological transfiguration guaranteed that Macondo and the Buendías dependably were ghosts to some degree, distanced and repelled from their own history, not just casualties of the brutal reality of reliance and underdevelopment additionally of the ideological dreams that reinforce and haunt such social conditions.

The Exaggeration of Life

Marquez utilizes a method that permits magical realism to work admirably in this novel, since he utilizes an exaggerated style of life. Macondo is a mystical place, which allows the characters not to see the magic, particularly the overstated types of life. In the meantime, the style that Marquez utilizes permits the reader to trust the magic. The degree in which individuals in the novel age is bewildering, this wonder is exemplified in the length of Pilar Ternera’s life (Bloom 54). Years before, when she was at the age of one hundred and forty-five years old, she had surrendered the malicious custom of monitoring her age and she continued living in the static and minimal time of memories. It is uncommon today that somebody lives to be more than a hundred years, and Pilar lives to well more than one hundred and forty-five years old, and yet she is not celebrating.

Exaggeration for Effect

All through One Hundred Years of Solitude, events are exaggerated by Garcia Marquez so as to gain fantasy. Be that as it may, the exaggeration is continuously numerically particular and gives every event a feeling of reality. Cases of this are Colonel Buendia’s 32 vanquished uprisings, the rainstorm that endures 4 years, 11 months, furthermore, 2 days and Fernanda’s mismatched timetable of sex, containing precisely forty-two available days. Magical realism as a system of changing the incredible into the truth is spoken to by Garcia Marquez. He can transform the unbelievable into the believable, as shown in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Work Cited

Bloom. Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. New York, NY: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009. Print.