Garcia Marquez explores the isolation, solitude, and melancholia experienced by the Macondo community, as a metaphor for a parallel isolation, solitude, and essential disconnectedness from the world as experienced by Colombia, and Latin America as a whole. Moreover, as in the life of that Latin American nation, non-reflective violence occurs again and again. Suppression of memory further isolates Macondo until eventually, Macondo creates a society (i.e., a reality) based (oxymoronically) on pure fantasy. Here, Garcia Marquez powerfully suggests how suppression of collective memory: of violence; invasion; challenges to collective identity; outside exploitation, and all else that serves to explain, for better worse, the history of a group, only deepens and increases inevitable disconnectedness within that place and its people.

Works Cited

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gregory Rabassa

Trans.). New York: Avon, 1971.

One Hundred Years of Solitude." Sparknotes. Retrieved May 11, 2005, at http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/solitude.htm.

Restorina, Maria...
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