Historical Themes of Garcia Marquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude

Historical Themes of Garcia Marquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude Garcia Marquez has verbalize that One Hundred Years of Solitude is non a explanation of Latin America, it is a metaphor for Latin America (Dreifus 19831974). The historical themes overwhelm conquest and settlement, settlement and scientific discovery, civil wars, foreign stinting intervention, scientific change, and finally the decay and disappearance of a long-established way of life. The original Spanish conquest is alluded to when, in the first chapter, Jose Arcadio Buendia finds an old suit of armor and the stay of a galleon, mysteriously stranded several kilometers from the sea. The early Spanish colonization and the devastating pirate raids of the English sailor, Sir Francis Drake, are referred to in the second chapter. Subsequently, no more is made of this theme. Pioneer settlement is the real beginning of the allegory of Macondo. It is at first a village of twenty houses of mud and canestalks on the bank of a diaphanous river. . . . The world was so new, many things did not have names, and to mention them one had to point with a finger. (71) Just so when the real pioneer families made their first crude homes in the forests of the Americas, they lay out many things-plants, animals, minerals - they had never seen before and for which they had no names. That was one reason Europeans referred to the Hesperian hemisphere lands as the New World. Typical of such villages, which were established on the banks of rivers in all the Spanish territories, Macondo is governed by its founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, as a grade of village chief Ursula, his wife, cultivates a little plot of land and the men, apparently, also hunt for food (although hunting is n... ...very rapidly. In real history, this is the period of the world-wide economic depression that began in 1929 and lasted a decade, until the beginning of World War II. Then, in the last chapter, when the last Aureliano finally leave s the house that has been his prison, we count to be in a new kind of Macondo. There are more battalion around, including several who are quite unlike any weve met before and seem unrelated to the old families of Macondo. What sort of town is this that has an eccentric Catalan school principal in rare books frequented by a group of eager schoolboyish writers? The town also has a drugstore, which we have never heard rough before, attended by an Egyptian-eyed girl named Mercedes. It also has some new and profligate brothels. Works CitedGarcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York Harper Perennial, 1991.