"One Hundred Years of Solitude"

Paper Summary:

Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fantastical masterpiece of magic realism, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967), chronicles the long, colorful, violent, repetitive and ultimately tragic history of the Buendia family of the mythical town of Macondo, an imaginary locale apparently based on Garcia Marquez's own small home town of Aracataca, Colombia. This paper suggests ways in which violence and suppression of memory within the story serve to create future cycles of violence (and future loss of memory), thereby symbolically illustrating the maxim that those (like the Buendias) who forget history shall be doomed to repeat it. The paper also suggests that the novel in many ways parallels the history of the Latin American nation of Colombia itself, and, in a broader sense, of all Latin American nations, especially in the sense of the modern domination of them by outside forces.

From the Paper:

"One Hundred Years of Solitude is a tale of groups, communities, and nations: that is, a collective, rather than an individual, story and metaphor. Toward that end and in that respect, this novel is not written, as are most North American and European novels, from a perspective of just one narrator, or "hero", but rather, from the perspectives of multiple individuals having the same experience, a sort of amalgamated, chorus of generations, in which significances are determined not individually and personally, but collectively and through comparison and consensus."

More papers on "One Hundred Years of Solitude":

• Book Review # 131378 : "One Hundred Years of Solitude" - An Analysis"
• Book Review # 113159 : "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
• Analytical Essay # 27041 : "One Hundred Years of Solitude": A Study in Isolation and Despair"
• Book Review # 115764 : "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

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