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One Hundred Years of Solitude demonstrates the extent to which the fragile distinction between reality and fantasy depends on the context and assumptions of time and place. The banana company, as well as Fernanda’s delusions of being a queen, are both powerful examples of how even frustrated ambition ultimately leads a person to succumb to a life of fantasy. The fantastic serves as a way to make exaggerations of real situations seem well… logical. García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude has a fantasy that becomes symbolic of our rational illusions. José Arcadio’s solution to the insomnia plague, for example, is to simply label everything with inked signs. But that in itself is not enough to ensure that people will remember the thing’s function, as well. Clearly, this leads us back to the story of the world, or, in the novel, the resumption of the story of the Buendias and Macondo families. One of many notes I can say about the overall composition of the story is how the line between real truth and consciousness had blurred together and kept the reader interested in turning the page. From my understanding, part of the fantastic is to create a present that seems so real while sounding chaotic and random at the same time. To quote the gypsy Melquiades, ” The world has a life of its own.”

3 Responses to “Finding Peace within so much Chaos”

  1. Kate Dearie says:

    I completely agree about the blurring of the lines in this story. Upon first read, we take them as very different things. We separate the fantastic from the real until we realize we need both to understand the story. The realism and fantastic must work together to be able to covey Márquez’s story. It helps us learn about how people see the world. But not just one person, multitalented people.

    • peterson20 says:

      I agree. The boundaries between the set reality and the fantastic need to be blurred and merged together in order to get a complete grasp of the story. It is first nature through out this course to try and separate the fantastic from the non-fantastic to try an analyze a story in discussion. That won’t work well in a story like OHYOS. OHYOS cannot be read like a Steven Millhauser story where we can pull the fantastic from the story like a separate layer in order to analyze it, it is instead interwoven so closely to”create a present that seems so real while sounding chaotic and random at the same time” we cannot effectively separate it as we have with past stories

  2. The labeling of objects reminds me of The Memory Police, in which the characters lose not only the name for something but the understanding of it — even the ability to grasp the object conceptually. What is perfume? What is a bird?