Gabriel Garcia Marquez--(latin America, Nobel Prize winner)


Background:

believes in true socialism and that literature could be used to promote socialism through exposure of political corruption and oppression

describing the condition of the common man

showing the effects of power and money (their corrupting influences on mankind)

was disillusioned with Soviet socialism, seeing it as authoritarian and bureacratic, not socialistic.

Style: magical realism to suggest possible stories beyond and within the one he is telling.

magical realism--the magical is just as much a given, is treated as a given, as the objective details are.

example: Senator Onesimo Sanchez was weatherless

to be weatherless is to be unaffected by the unpleasant world of hot weather, to have separated oneself from the real world of heat, and of poverty

However his shirt "was soaked in a kind of light-colored soup"--not soaked with sweat, but the weather, again inescapable, soaks him, showing its power.


Title: "Death Constant Beyond Love"

--the reality of life is that death is more constant than love is.


Thematic concern: Solitude.


Symbolism:

the rose,

campaign props,

the chastity belt,

Laura Farina

Laura--beloved

Farina--the Roman goddess of fertility--Ceres (cereal)

Epic creation: Garcia Marquez created a complete fictional world based on realities, Macondo, that has a complete history, geography, and a people.