An Examination of Magical Realism and Political Allegory in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract

This paper examines how Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) fuses magical realism with political allegory to interpret Latin America’s historical experience. Drawing on theorists of the marvelous such as Wendy B. Faris, it argues that the novel’s matter-of-fact treatment of the supernatural levitations, prophetic manuscripts, cyclical plagues operates not as ornament but as an analytic lens that renders political realities newly legible. Reading Macondo as a microcosm of the continent, the study connects the Buendía family saga to patterns of founding innocence and isolation, nineteenth-century civil wars and caudillismo and twentieth-century neo-colonial extraction epitomized by the “banana company” and the erased massacre of striking workers. The analysis shows how narrative strategies of repetition and circular time enact historical fatalism, while motifs of insomnia and forgetfulness figure collective amnesia that permits violence to recur. Magical episodes, from Remedios the Beauty’s ascension to the purgative four-year rain, intensify the absurdity and horror of state denial and corporate impunity, even as they mythologize local history into archetype. The paper concludes that García Márquez’s seamless interweaving of the marvelous and the mundane is integral to his political critique: by destabilizing rationalist frames and embracing alternative epistemologies, the novel exposes the cycles of corruption, exploitation and memory’s failure that condemn Macondo and by extension Latin America to “one hundred years of solitude.”