100 years of salitude essay

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a well known Columbian novelist, journalist and short-story writer. ”˜100 Years of Solitude’ brought him world famousness, it is one his most successful work. Marquez wrote in the genre of magical realism, where reality is masterfully combined with magic and supernatural elements. The plot summary is perfectly showed in the name of novel – ”˜100 Years of Solitude’ ”“ It describes the story of Buendia family during 100 years. The novel raised a number of psychological questions. The central question of the whole story is solitude. The structural build of the story is modified around the question of solitude showing the loneliness of Buendia family members during the hundred of years. What is solitude and how it is realized in the concept of the novel?

Solitude is usually treated by individuals as sharply subjective, particularly individual and often unique emotional experience. One of the most noticeable and specific traits that perfectly characterize solitude is a specific feeling of full self concentration. The solitude as a feeling is not like the other feeling and emotional experiences, it is fully self integrated and absolutely gripping. Every individual could find in the feeling of solitude some kind of experience.

Solitude is the sign of selfness of an individual. It lets him know who actually he in this life is. Solitude is a specific form of self perception and a sharp form of self-consciousness. It is not essential for individual to define all the stages and statements he is involved in, but solitude needs a serious attention to it. That is how psychologists define solitude.

The novel of solitude could be called without the word “solitude” in the name. But the theme of loneliness is mainstream for all novels of this author. Solitude is the central theme, which attracted the writer and pierced all creative works of the writer as well as solitude pierced all his heroes. They are ill with solitude. The theme is alike musical motive in the magnificent symphony of the novel. The centralization of ”˜100 Years of Solitude’ is achieved by the means of collection of solitude broken on a number of pieces; it imparts to the heroes the trait of solitude, so unlike the others, but as lonely face as the others faces are. Solitude of death was told about by Melquiades (it was considered that the old Gypsy visited the underworld, but she could not stand solitude there and decided to be back in this world); solitude of power, which subordinated one of the most talented members of Buendia family Aureliano (he was actually lost in the desert solitude of his immense power, unable to escape and leave it); solitude of old ages, which took the years from the life of the most charming heroines of this novel Ursula Iguaran (she was blind, that is why her last years had no colors and light); solitude of inaccessibility, which was the lot of Amarantha (she closed the door of her bedroom, to cry endless tears for her solitary destiny). Every hero of the novel is drawn in unique and bright colors, each of them has hi personal fate and destiny, but everyone of them has a certain mission. They help the reader to feel their endless and inexpressible solitude. The author lets the reader to enter the dynamic world of human feelings and emotional state. Every hero of the novel has his or her personal solitude, unlike anyone else’s.

The author masterfully depicted the portrait of personal solitude, generalizing the picture of the whole family, whose significant identity was that solitude. They drowned in the desert of personal solitude, roaming aimlessly, trying to knock to the locked doors without any hope for reply. This is the key motive of the novel as well as regular reminds of their inability for warmth. These motives were defined by Marquez himself, when he was answering numerous questions of the journalists after the novel was published. The author made a huge stress on individuality of every heroes’ solitude as on unique feeling, that could not be felt by the others. The author signified solitude as an essential part of his creative life, which makes him closer to the heroes of his novels.

In the process of our everyday life we feel and understand ourselves only in the field of particular attitude to the surrounding world. We are living and passing through our statement in the context of wide and complicated mutual networks. The solitude gives as sign to an individual that there are some faults in the network. The solitude of Ursula is the bright illustration of this theory on the physical level. She had lost her eyesight and her connection to the surrounding world was broken. She went deeply went down in her solitude of being blind and separated from the life and society.

It is a typical case that solitude is often are showed in the form of necessity of being included in some kind of group, wishing it or just simply necessity being in the contact with somebody. The basement in such cases is realization of something missed or feeling loss and ruin. This model could be applied to the case of Melquiades.  His solitude of death is perfectly corresponding to this psychological description. Being in the underworld, he was absolutely isolated and lonely. That is why he found the way to return. He was the one who needed certain communication.

The theme of solitude within the pages of ”˜100 Years of Solitude’ could be endlessly discussed in the aspect of physiological analysis. The book of solitude gives a good soil for thinking and re-comprehension of some philosophical and psychological aspects. This story describes phenomenal trait of a certain family. The unique origin of personal solitude of every hero in this book is perfectly corresponding to the scientific description of such psychological phenomenon as solitude. Marques was the one who considered himself to be solitude in his creativity as nobody could help him to write, what he wanted. That unites the author with the heroes of the novel, but the same time their solitude is of different origin.



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