Magical Realism, Social Protest and Anti-Colonial Sentiments in One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Instance of Historiographic Metafiction

This article highlights Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s use of magical realism in connection to his portrayal of anti-colonial sentiments in his epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien anos de soledad, 1967/1970). To study the novel, we define Garcia Marquez’s response to the political condition of Latin America in the backdrop of the postcolonial paradigm. Highlighting that magical realism enables a writer to challenge the authenticity of the so-called objective reality and at the same time attempts to “write back to the Centre” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989, ix), we draw attention to the technique of magical realism as an important tool employed to register social protest against the lingering effects of the process of colonialism. We also address the question as to how the moments of magical realism in the novel overlap with various historical dimensions of Latin America, especially Colombia‘s ability to raise constructs of protest of varying degrees.