Gabriel Garcia-Marquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia. Raised by his grandparents in the remote isolated village, Marquez has become a literary celebration with such books as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera," winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982 (Gabriel pg). He attended Universidad Nacional in Bogota and studied law at the Universidad de Cartagena. While writing a column for El Universal in college, he became disinterested in law and began studying literature (Gabriel pg). He was honored by the Swedish Academy of Letters "for his novels and short stories in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts" (Gabriel pg). There is little doubt that Marquez's upbringing had a tremendous effect on his life. His grandfather, former Colonel Nicholas Ricardo Marquez Mejia,...
Mejia was a Liberal and had openly criticized those responsible for the banana massacres during the War of a Thousand Days and had given a speech about the murders before Congress in 1929 (Gabriel pg). The War of a Thousand Days, 1899-1903 was a Colombian civil war between Liberals, plantation owners and merchants, and Conservatives that resulted in 130,000 deaths and national economic ruin (Thousand pg). Gabriel grew up listening to the history his grandfather had witnessed and participated and his grandmother's folk tales and superstitions (Gabriel pg). This combination of reality and fantasy is certain to have influenced and nourished Gabriel's writing style of magical realism.
This may be because of the fact that the author took it upon himself to reveal the names of the hostages who were killed and who were ultimately released. Since the main drama in the book is trying to imagine what will happen next, there is no fun in reading what has happened after knowing the ending of the book. (News of a Kidnapping) After reading the book, Villamizar
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis both place the protagonist in opposition to a prevailing family structure. At the same time, the family structure dictates personal identity, character traits, worldviews, and reactions to events. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold and in The Metamorphosis, personal identities are malleable and yet the changes that occur take place within a confining social structure at which
Particularly the Caribbean. To grow up in such an environment is to have fantastic resources for poetry. Also, in the Caribbean, we are capable of believing anything, because we have the influences of [Indian, pirate, African, and European] cultures, mixed in with Catholicism and our own local beliefs. I think that gives us an open-mindedness to look beyond apparent reality (Sidelights, 2006). Similarly, Love in the Time of Cholera, set
The use of Magical Realism by Marquez is a technique for writing that does not distinguish between what is real and what is fantastic and a "value literary label that has been applied to many writers." (Sickles, nd, p.24) it was the desire of Marquez to capture the voice of his grandmother in his writings. Marquez used Magical Realism in the incorporation of mythical elements into realistic fiction and
The angel's position as a symbol of faith is revealed not only through his wings, but also through his first appearance drenched in mud. In Christian theology, the relationship between God and man began with God's creation of Adam through a mixture of earthly clay and divine spirit (Genesis 2:7). The angel's appearance in the mud highlights the duality of this relationship -- that it is at the same
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende use unconventional story structures, complex themes, and characterizations to convey the social, political, and cultural realities of Latin America. One Hundred Years of Solitude traces the evolution of one town, through the eyes and soul of its most prominent family. In spite of the radical transformations that transpire over the course of one hundred years in the life of Macondo, Marquez shows that
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