Reality of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'

The reality of the universe of this particular work in One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez erases the boundaries between the fantastic or imaginary and the real in order to present a situation in which both coexist in harmony. Although literary critics who see the novel as a totality unto itself, with its own declared ends bearing only an analogous relationship to society's activity, may well object to this kind of test. Such critics may seek to judge novelists, not according to how well they depict real life, but in terms of how they create a new reality in an independent literary world. But since the novelist has an impact upon society, we argue that his work must also be judged on its view of 'reality' and its interaction with human events. The characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude speak as if at a long and phenomenal party. The folkloric myth has existed among rural peoples because for many readers life in Macondo seems real not only because its inhabitants reflect the simple lore of a 'better time' but because it seems that had outside national and international forces not meddled in their existence, life might have continued to be 'good.'The universe fashioned by this author is populated with both the living and the dead. They often share an equal status, an equal citizenship in this mythical state Márquez has founded. Their claim to residence is the common psychological virus that has infected all of them-solitude.

Furthermore, these aparecidos serve to erase the barriers of space and time between the living and the dead. For example, the revenants or aparecidos do not appear different from their original status on earth or from other humans. The aparecidos continue to perform human functions even though they are now 'officially' dead. The dead continue to eat and drink, or indulge in their previous occupations and preoccupations. An example is the murdered Prudencio Aguilar, who would not leave his murderer, Jose Arcadio Buendia, alone. Jose '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 he searched through the house looking for some water. The presence of these supposed phantoms blurs the lines of demarcation between these two realities. Márquez's characters do not experience man's anguish and fear toward death and the dead. This acceptance of death acknowledges the eternal nature of time. Death does not mean an end to existence but merely the other side of the coin of life: the belief in ghosts, revenants and other similar apparitions is very common throughout rural and urban Colombia, but the intensity of these beliefs and the interpretation of details vary considerably from place to place.

Furthermore, such beliefs are limited mainly to a lower rural level and tend to disappear with increasing urban influence. In Aritama, however, the entire village lives under the permanentfear of apparitions, and even the most sophisticated inhabitants are firmly convinced of their existence. Everyone is terrified by the thought of seeing or hearing a ghost. Melquiadez had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant [and) 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 forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.Life in Macondo seems real not only because its inhabitants reflect the simple lore of a 'better time' but because it seems that had outside national and international forces not meddled in their existence, life might have continued to be 'good.'

Márquez and whose book about him was made possible by that special relationship, summed up symbolism in One Hundred Years of Solitude described 'Just as the Buendia family synthesizes and reflects Macondo. Macondo synthesizes and reflects (at the same time that it denies) true reality: its history condenses human history... especially that of Latin America from its social origins to its extinction: those one hundred years of life reproduce the vicissitudes of all civilization (birth. development. apogee. decline. death), and. more precisely, the stages that have passed (or are passing) in the majority of third-world satieties, the neocolonial countries.' (p. 298- 299) Events do not appear so 'fantastic' at all but a fundamental aspect of the reality of village life that he has fashioned. Separating the different folkloric elements belonging to this field of the fantastic.