Magic realism acts as resistance against Western hegemony . In One Hundred years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez rediscovers the history of Latin America in an allegorical way. Magic realism is a narrative technique which acts as an identity of Latin America and on the other hand its hybrid characteristic is a protest against the conventional Western norm. Magical realism, unlike the fantastic or the surreal, presumes that the individual requires a bond with the traditions and the faith of the community, that s/he is historically constructed and connected. Like many Latin American writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been inextricably linked to this style of literature,” magical realism." Literature of this type is usually characterized …show more content…
Magical realists incorporate some other techniques that have been linked to post-colonialism, with hybridity being a primary feature. Magic realism itself is hybrid. Specifically, magical realism is illustrated in the inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous. The plots of magical realist works involve issues of borders, mixing, and change. Authors establish these plots to reveal a crucial purpose of magical realism: a more deep and true reality than conventional realist techniques would illustrate. Latin America once had a thriving population of native Aztecs and Incas, but, slowly, as European explorers arrived, the native population had to adjust to the technology and capitalism that the outsiders brought with them. Similarly, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo begins as a very simple settlement, and money and technology become common only when people from the outside world begin to arrive. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells a story about Colombian history and, even more broadly, about Latin America’s struggles with colonialism and with its own emergence into modernity. Garcia Marquez employs an indigenous oral tradition in One Hundred …show more content…
This novel never loses its capacity to surprise and delight. No matter whom we meet, we quickly learn to expect the unexpected, the colourful, the original--from moments of evocative beauty, like the trail of butterflies, to the satiric, like the priest levitating to chocolate, to erotic scene of bawdy and prodigious sex, like characters whose farts are so strong they kill all the flowers in the house or man who runs through the house balancing beer bottles on his penis. The comic energy here is justly famous. The characters, for the most part, may be two-dimensional, and we may meet some of them only for a couple of pages, but there is throughout a sense of vitality and wonder at the world which makes this story hard to put