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One Hundred Years:The Opening
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Read carefully the following excerpt from Gabriel Garcia
Marquezs 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,
considerliterary elements such as tone, point of view, selection
of
detail, and figurative language.
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+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.
Notice the diction and
imagery
Write commentary about the
diction and imagery
Diction and Imagery Commentary
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+Questions to Consider
Why does Garcia Marquez mention ice in conjunction with
ColonelAureliano Buendias memory? Why is this significant to the
developmentof Aurelianos character?
Note the references to time in the first sentence. What tenses
does thesentence employ? What does this suggest about the
chronology of thenovel?
How does the description of Macondo suggest a kind of
Edenicparadise? What Biblical allusions, explicit or implicit, can
you identify inthe 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
thevillage?
Compare the first sentence of the chapter to the last sentence
of the firstchapter. What things in common do both sentences
mention? Discusshow these elements contribute to the themes and
structure of the novel.
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+Magic Realism
The termmagic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a
schoolof painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge
LuisBorges in Argentina as well as the work of writers such
asGabriel Garcia Marquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany,and
John Fowles in England. These writers interweave, in
anever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in
representingordinary events and descriptive details together with
fantasticand dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived
frommyth and fairy tale These novels violate, in various
ways,standard novelistic expectations by drasticand sometimeshighly
effectiveexperiments with subject matter, form, style,temporal
sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic,the mythical,
and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur thetraditional
distinctions between what is serious or trivial,horrible or
ludicrous, tragic or comic.
-M.H. Abrams,A Glossary of Literary Terms.
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+Themes/Motifs (not exhaustive) pestilential
solitude and solitary
Incest as solitude
Animals
Animal imagery
Birds Ants
Flowers/Trees
Forces of nature, weather
Music, celebration, vitality, love
Technology
Circle
Odors
Role of memory and language in
creation/being
Passage of time, decay, restoration /entropy
Repetition, sameness / cyclicalnature of time
Futility, fear
Fate / prophecy
Biblical allusion (three days, GenesisandRevelation, etc.)
Constructed reality/realities
Proximity of life and death
Proximity of madness and lucidity
