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A Distinctive Mingle Of Fantasy And Reality

A DISTINCTIVE MINGLE OF FANTASY AND REALITY
When speaking of the excellence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, one wonders how Garcia Marquez came to create such a richly composed imaginary world so similar to our everyday one and yet so different from it. He somehow handles a reality in which the limits of the real and the fantastic fade away naturally. This unique style of story-telling is known as "magic realism", and is defined as a narrative technique in which the author emphasizes the fantastic quality of extraordinary events. In the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez successfully demonstrates the technique of magic realism through a skillful integration of fantasy and reality, and the peculiar description of the events and characters.
This feat requires analysis of his resources, especially the most important one: his narrative tone. The author has intuitively grasped the vital relationship that exists between space and tone when he noticed that tone could serve as the main unifying force in the novel. Tone belongs by all rights to the narrator's voice: someone who would report all the incidents calm and untouched, without comments or moral judgments on what has happened. Garcia Marquez chose to employ this serious tone to make unbelievable ideas seems real, because it allows him to dispense with explanations and justifications. With his authentic presentation of events - the tone, there is no need to justify all the implausible phenomena in the story. His sole duty is to simply recount the tale in the most natural fashion, so that the intangible can be associated with the tangible with the greatest of ease. As Garcia Marquez has once asserted himself, "the key to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was the idea of saying incredible things with a completely unperturbed face." (McMurray, p. 87) In order to fuse the fantastic or improbable perfectly into realistic occurrences, the only effective way is to...