1

Magical Realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Büşra Yağmur UZAN

Literature And Magical Realism

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nazli GÜNDÜZ

 2

I. Introduction

Magical realism is a narrative mode that mixes the everyday with the strange, adding

magical elements to settings that are otherwise realistic without changing the way the story

makes sense. While it differentiates itself from pure fiction or fantasy, magical realism allows

the supernatural to exist as a normal aspect of the reality by grounding the magical inside the

everyday. Magical realism has been central to postcolonial and Latin American fiction

because it offers one means to undermine prevailing Western notions of reality, history, and

identity.

Maggie Ann Bowers describes magical realism as a “mode in which the magical

exists as part of reality,” its double commitment to realistic representation and mythic or

supernatural content (Bowers, 2004, p. 2). For Bowers, magical realism is a way of

representing histories and experiences marginalized by traditional realist fiction. Lois

Parkinson Zamora, however, situates magical realism in an overarching ideological critique

of modernity. In Zamora’s view, magical realism is a way of disagreeing with the binary

oppositions of rational versus irrational, educated versus primitive, and real versus unreal.

She contends that the way that magical realism treats time, the self, and the supernatural

specifically destroys the ontological dualisms that dominate Western thought (Zamora, 1995,

p. 501).

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) stands as a

quintessential example of magical realism. The novel challenges linear historiography, blurs

the lines between history, myth, and metaphysics, and dissolves individual identity into

collective memory through its cyclical structure, spectral figures, and mythic logic. Through

the analysis of Bowers and Zamora’s perspectives, this essay explores how Garcia Marquez

interprets the lines between fact and fiction.

II. Collective Identity and Archetypal Characters

 3

Because magical realism emphasizes characters who represent collective experience,

it frequently challenges the Western emphasis on individuality. Bowers states that

“Characters in magical realist fiction often seem more representative of a group, a

community, or a cultural type than psychologically developed individuals,” (Bowers, 2004, p.

67). The Buendía family in One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a straight line of a family

but rather a repeating pattern of archetypes whose names and acts blur the line between

individual identity and family destiny. Each José Arcadio and each Aureliano is a variation of

a mythic type, re-enacting shared traits and destinies that transcend generations. This repeated

cycle makes it seem like time, personality, and history are stuck in an endless circle that does

not let the story end or the characters grow in the usual realism way. As the narrator remarks,

“It’s as if time had turned back and they were living through the same days all over again”

(Garcia Marquez, 1967, p. 348).

Each José Arcadio character is characterized by impulsivity, sensuality, and

corporeality, which are frequently connected to violence and physical excess. On the other

hand, Aurelianos are intellectual, reflective, and lonely. Across the family tree, these

opposing archetypes divide like two mythic lineages, masculine divisions between body and

spirit, flesh and mind. A combination of both traits can be found in José Arcadio Buendía, the

patriarch of the family: a utopian visionary who also spirals into compulsive madness. His

sons and grandsons carry on fragments of his identity in repetitive, degenerative echoes. As

the family line expands, it becomes evident that names are not simply inherited but

deterministic, marking each new child as the rebirth of a previous archetype. As is often

stated in the novel, “Aureliano Segundo did not know at what moment he began to confuse

her with Remedios, his mother, and even with the other Remedios, the Beauty” (Garcia

Marquez, 1967, p. 276), revealing how characters’ blur across generations.

Individual subjectivity is harmed as a result of this archetypal repetition. Through the

characters, inherited patterns can be observed and collective memory is preserved. According
 4

to Zamora, magical realism frequently depends on “archetypes that collapse the boundary

between the personal and the communal,” which is in line with Jungian psychology (Zamora,

1995, p. 506). In the Buendía family, there is no real psychological growth, only iteration.

The absence of historical progression, each generation doomed to forget the lessons of the

last, contributes to a mythic consciousness where identity is circular and inherited rather than

self-fashioned.

Ursula Iguarán, one of the few characters who lives through multiple generations,

becomes a witness to this circular structure. Her warnings about repeated names and

behaviours point to her awareness of the family’s fate, yet even she cannot prevent the

eventual collapse. The final child, born with the prophesied pig’s tail, literalizes the mythic

curse and completes the circle of solitude. The family’s destruction is not simply a narrative

resolution, but the fulfilment of a symbolic structure rooted in repetition and forgetfulness.

The Enlightenment values of autonomy, agency, and psychological interiority are all

challenged by this mythologizing of identity. Bowers notes that the mythic style of magical

realism “places characters within a broader system of belief or history, rather than

emphasizing character motivation or development” (Bowers, 2004, p. 71). The cynical

repetition structure in One Hundred Years of Solitude has similarities to old oral traditions

and tribal systems of thought, in which community tales and ancestral cycles define identity,

rather than individual choice.

In conclusion, Garcia Marquez challenges Western ideas of the self through the

Buendías. The family members become into archetypes stuck in a civilizational and personal

story. Their incapacity to flee their names, their fates, and even their solitude highlights how

magical realism may express a worldview where time is a cycle identity is collective, and the

limits of the self are historical and hollow.

III. Philosophical Layers: Multiple Realities

 5

Instead of providing a single, empirically based universe, magical realism suggests a

multi-layered, pluralistic understanding of reality that incorporates the psychological,

mythical, and metaphysical into the everyday. Bowers states that magical realism “questions

the assumption of a single, objective reality” and instead “allows for the coexistence of

multiple realities, rational and irrational, magical and empirical” (Bowers, 2004, p. 21).

Zamora similarly says that magical realism “resists ontological closure” and instead produces

narratives that are “resolutely multiple, unstable, and interpretively open” (Zamora, 1995, p.

504). In García Márquez’s novel, Macondo exists simultaneously as a physical village, a

mythical origin, and a metaphorical universe. The coexistence of these layers is evident when

the town wakes to find Remedios the Beauty has ascended into the sky while folding sheets:

“She was not a creature of this world,” the narrator calmly asserts, collapsing the magical into

the real with no disruption (García Márquez, 1967, p. 286).

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, this multiplicity of realities is most clearly embodied in

the figure of Melquíades and his mysterious manuscripts. The manuscripts collapse the

boundaries between time, identity, and authorship, as they contain the history of the Buendía

family. In the novel’s closing pages, Aureliano reads the parchments only to realize that “he

was reading about himself,” and that “everything written on them was unrepeatable since it

had always been foreseen” ((García Márquez, 1967, p. 417). This metafictional device shakes

up traditional ideas of what makes a story true and suggests that the text, the world it

describes, and the act of reading it are all connected on a single level of reality.

This story also shows the impact of Jorge Luis Borges, who is another great master of

metaphysical storytelling. Like Borges’ characters, the Buendías become trapped in textual

beings that keep meaning and perception going around and around. They are bound by a fatal

script they can neither alter nor escape, as the narrator reveals that “the history of the family

was written in the manuscripts, and it was the history of Macondo, and it was the history of

the world” ((García Márquez, 1967, p. 418). Magical realism, then, becomes not just a
 6

narrative mode, but a philosophical meditation on the elusive, fragmented nature of reality

itself.

IV. Spectrality and Temporality

Ghosts are more than just figures from the past in One Hundred Years of Solitude. They

are at the heart of the book’s metaphysical structure and philosophical outlook. As Lois

Parkinson Zamora argues, the ghost in magical realism is not solely a symbol of memory or

trauma, but a narrative mechanism that challenges linear temporality and ontological

boundaries. Ghosts in Marquez’s novel operate at the intersection of the historical, the

mythical, and the poetic, resisting closure and reinforcing the cyclical nature of time

(Zamora, 1995, p. 503).

Characters such as Melquíades and Prudencio Aguilar exemplify this spectral function.

Prudencio, killed in a duel by José Arcadio Buendía, returns not in vengeance but in

melancholic longing. He appears as a physical presence burdened by the wound that killed

him, haunting the household until it relocates, suggesting that historical violence cannot be

buried but must be re-encountered. As the narrator describes, “He appeared in the bathroom,

dripping with blood, carrying his wound open like a monstrous flower” (García Márquez,

1967, p. 25). Melquíades, more than a ghost, transcends death itself. He reappears after

dying, not only to guide the Buendía family but to serve as the novel’s spectral narrator,

erasing the distinction between the living and the dead, and between author and character.

“Melquíades had not died, he returned because he could not bear the solitude,” the narrator

tells us, blurring the finality of death (García Márquez, 1967, p. 197).

Time in Macondo is never linear; instead, it folds into itself, repeating events, names, and

destinies in a mythic loop. As Bowers says, magical realism tends to favour “cyclical patterns

of time and history” over Western notions of progress and causality (Bowers, 2004, p. 66).
 7

Modernist ideals for the development of the story are subverted by this temporal structure.

The loss of temporal certainty in the story is reflected in Ursula’s late-life illusion that she has

already fallen asleep. “The truth is that she had been in a world of shadows for a long time,”

the narrator explains, showing how she exists in a liminal state between life and death (García

Márquez, 1967, p. 310). Her ghost-like state while still alive illustrates how the boundaries

between life and death, past and present, are constantly blurred.

Marquez challenges the rationalist history that marginalizes indigenous, emotional, and

spiritual knowing by integrating ghosts into everyday life and dismantling linear time. As

Zamora observes, such hauntings reveal a “historical consciousness that is nonlinear and

multiple,” reflecting a worldview in which the past continually reasserts itself in the present

(Zamora,1995, p. 509). One Hundred Years of Solitude, through its spectral presences and

mythic temporality, exemplifies magical realism’s subversive power to reimagine both

history and subjectivity.

V. Politics

Magical realism is also an effective tool for political criticism. As Lois Parkinson

Zamora says, magical realism “undermines the authority of historical discourse by presenting

alternative versions of history that refuse linear progression and rational causality” (Zamora,

1995, p. 504). In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez constructs a

mythic history of Macondo, one that mirrors, distorts, and critiques the historical trajectories

of Latin America. The novel does not tell a coherent story about a country. Instead, it uses the

rise and fall of Macondo as a metaphor for how repetitive, violent, and silly Latin American

political history is.

The futility of political idealism within this cyclical structure reveals by The character of

Colonel Aureliano Buendía. His numerous civil wars, precisely thirty-two, result in no lasting

social change. He starts out as a rebel with a clear sense of purpose, but as time goes on, he
 8

loses hope and pulls away, making tiny gold fishes over and over again. “He really had been

through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude,” suggesting that

even revolutionaries are haunted by the very void they attempt to fill (García Márquez, 1967,

p. 263). His initially idealistic political involvement turns into a pointless cycle, representing

how Latin America’s revolutionary spirit is frequently sucked up by its own inactivity. As

Bowers suggests, magical realism frequently highlights “the failures of political and historical

progress” by blending myth with historical reality (Bowers, 2004, p. 64).

The ongoing pattern of violence and bureaucracy is almost comical. The massacre of the

banana workers, a reference to the 1928 United Fruit Company strike in Colombia, is erased

from official memory, just as the railroad company’s presence in Macondo vanishes without

trace. “There must have been three thousand of them,” says José Arcadio Segundo. Yet,

“there weren’t any dead,” according to the official reports (García Márquez, 1967, p. 306). In

this, Marquez satirizes the silencing mechanisms of institutional power. Zamora describes

this erasure as a kind of haunting, noting that “history becomes a ghost to be exorcised”

(Zamora, 1995, p. 509). In One Hundred Years of Solitude, ghosts are not merely personal;

they are also political. The dead return, not for revenge, but as reminders of forgotten

violence and unresolved trauma.

Macondo itself might function as a metaphor for the nation-state, repeating patterns of

colonization, modernization, rebellion, and collapse. Its ultimate destruction, foretold in

Melquíades’ manuscripts, signals the failure of historical progress and the illusion of national

destiny. “Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second

opportunity on earth” (García Márquez, 1967, p. 422), the novel concludes, an epitaph not

only for the Buendías, but for the recurring historical cycles of Latin America. By presenting

history as cyclical and haunted, Marquez resists the logic of Enlightenment historiography

and asserts a magical realist vision of history that is mythic, poetic, and deeply political.
 9

VI. Conclusion

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is not just a foundation of

magical realism but a deep reflection on the nature of history, identity, and reality. With

its mixture of the extraordinary and the ordinary, the novel dissolves the distinctions

between myth and history, between the dead and the living, and between fiction and

reality. It represents what Lois Parkinson Zamora has termed an “epistemological

dissent,” resisting Western modernity’s linear, rationalist, and empiricist presumptions

(Zamora, 1995, p. 501). As established through the novel’s form, characters, and narrative

voice, Marquez re-establishes a reality in which time is cyclical, history is haunted, and

identity is collective, not singular.

At the centre of the book is the family Buendía, a family that recycles itself in names,

characteristics, and fate, a collection of archetypes reacting to a common Latin American

consciousness. The circular movements of solitude, bloodshed, and forgetfulness are not

individual failings but cultural and historical trauma. Bowers states that magical realist

characters are representatives of communal experience rather than independent

individuals (Bowers, 2004, p. 67). Marquez carries this tradition further by making each

Buendía a symbol and symptom of larger historical forces, and suggesting that identity is

inherited, mythic, and attached to the collective memory of people and place.

The novel’s handling of ghosts and the supernatural also invites this kind of reading.

Ghosts are not ornamental in One Hundred Years of Solitude; they are metaphysical.

Ghosts such as Melquíades and Prudencio Aguilar are not so much reminders of the past

as embodiments of unresolved memory and unresolved history. Zamora summarizes this

quite simply as “history becomes a ghost to be exorcised” (Zamora, 1995, p. 509), and

Marquez’s ghostly landscape affirms this haunting as both political and personal. Ghosts

disrupt boundaries between life and death, past and present, and render it impossible to

try to circumscribe memory within official discourse.

 10

Finally, One Hundred Years of Solitude creates a dense, multi-layered, poetic, and

politically aware imaginative vision of Latin American history. Its magical realism is not

an escape but a confrontation, challenging readers to question the shape of history, the

nature of identity, and the truth of reality. Magical realism, as Bowers and Zamora

illustrate, is not merely a literary aesthetic, it is a strategy of resistance, remembrance, and

reinvention. Marquez’s work lives on because it will not be shut, instead opening up a

universe in which reality is always more mysterious, tragic, and marvellous than it at first

appears.

References

Bowers, M. A. (2004). Magic(al) realism. Routledge.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (1967). One hundred years of solitude. Penguin Books.

Zamora, L. P. (1995). Magical romance/magical realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American

fiction. In L. P. Zamora & W. B. Faris (Eds.), Magical realism: Theory, history,

community (pp. 497–518). Duke University Press.