Apr
17
Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1
Posted by: | April 17, 2010 | Comments Off on Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1
This book being very famous it was definitely great to finally read it.
From the start of the book, I was reading with the notion of "magical realism" in the back of my mind as it has been a central theme in the course. I was very surprised with the way this theme presented itself in the book however. What I mean by this is that real objects that are mundane to us are presented in this book as magical. Ice, for example is one of the objects that are presented. It is spoken of as if it were an artifact with many magical properties and many unknowns. This seems odd because in the priod readings that which was presented as magical usually consisted of things that were foreign to the europeans. For example, in the Kingdom of tis World, the perspective through which the slaves see Mackandall’s fall into the fire as a flight reflects a point of view that isunknown to the europeans. This perspective introduces the europeans to the point that there are other views out there than their own, and that even though they may not see these alternate views as correct, these alternate views do influence the thoughts and behaivours of those who believe them to the same degree as ‘reality’ would for the europeans. In this book, the reader is aware of what the object is however the characters are not. Therefore there is also a play on the different points of view int his novel. There is also some variance as to whom is correct and which view of reality will be taken as "true".
