Unique+Literary+Devices



Mystical Tone/Magic Realism

It's said that Garcia Marquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, greatly influenced his writing style with her animated story telling. She loved to tell him stories - old and new, real and fantastical- and she became "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality" that would breathe life into his novels. Marquez uses vibrant, commanding language to describe the most ordinary events, a common device in One Hundred Years of Solitude. One particularly memorable passage occurs on page 95; Jose Arcadio has returned from his life as a vagabond. He is a huge brute, known for seducing many women with his extraordinarily masculine strength. He comes home, finds Rebeca, and takes her to his bed.

"She [Rebeca] had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startlingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by the waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with three slashes of its claws and quartered her like a little bird. She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock with absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter."

He doesn't simply lift her up by his human ability, but with the untamed power of nature, of a cyclone. Marqeuz likens the young and beautiful Rebeca to a bird, sweet and delicate. The stark contrast between the two characters is then punctuated with the intensity of their lovemaking, an "inconceivable pleasure" buried in "unbearable pain."

Vivid? Yes. Shocking? A bit. But powerful? You bet.