Abstract

Malleable Time and Magic Realism in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Indu Jain

Volume: 15 Issue: 1 2025

Abstract:

Time is often characterised as an unseen element, ephemeral and yet ever present in the background to any narrative, wherein the action unfolds in the foreground. However, in the hands of a masterful writer like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it becomes malleable and prone to manipulation, such that it becomes a key element in the novel. In one of the most celebrated books by Marquez—One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the unending quality of South American Dictatorship is articulated through a novelised version of time where any distinction between the past and present disappears. It reorganises time from being a sequence, a teleological chronology, to being a vast temporal collage. This kind of time, at times stagnant, perpetuates patriarchs’ omnipresence. In contrast, in his later novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Marquez is able to fragment the image of the central character into a symphony of perspectives, enabling a multi-perspectival impression of various individuals vis-à-vis the protagonist, which is made visible in the text.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.37648/ijrssh.v15i01.002

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References

• García Márquez, Gabriel and Gregory Rabassa. The Autumn of the Patriarch. 1st Harper Perennial ed. New York, N.Y., Harper Perennial, 1991.
• Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Penguin Classics, 2000.