One Hundred Years: The Opening

Read carefully the following excerpt from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the narrator creates the setting for the action of the novel. In your analysis, consider literary elements such as tone, point of view, selection of detail, and figurative language.

Divide your paper into two columns -In the first column, list words that seem emotionally potent. -In the second column, write commentary about some or all of the words you chose, analyzing their effect on the reader. Describe the feelings and associations that seem connected to the words. Diction and Imagery Commentary Notice the diction and imagery Write commentary about the diction and imagery

Questions to Consider Why does Garcia Marquez mention ice in conjunction with Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s memory? Why is this significant to the development of Aureliano’s character? Note the references to time in the first sentence. What tenses does the sentence employ? What does this suggest about the chronology of the novel? How does the description of Macondo suggest a kind of Edenic paradise? What Biblical allusions, explicit or implicit, can you identify in the novel? If Macondo is analogous with Eden, what seems to constitute the Fall within the context of the novel? What do the gypsies bring to the village? Compare the first sentence of the chapter to the last sentence of the first chapter. What things in common do both sentences mention? Discuss how these elements contribute to the themes and structure of the novel.

Magic Realism The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England. These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tale… These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly effective—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur the traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic. -M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.

Themes/Motifs (not exhaustive) Role of memory and language in creation/being Passage of time, decay Repetition, sameness / cyclical nature of time Futility Fate / prophecy Biblical allusion (three days, Genesis and Revelation, etc.) Constructed reality/realities Proximity of life and death Proximity of madness and lucidity “pestilential” “solitude” and “solitary Incest as solitude Animals Animal imagery Birds Ants Flowers/Trees Forces of nature, weather Music, celebration, vitality, love Technology Circle