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Foreshadowing
Chapter 13
Explanation and Analysis:
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a paradigmatic example of magical realism, a genre that fuses the fantastic with the ordinary and treats the supernatural as an accepted part of everyday life. Magical realism is often associated with Latin American literature due to the number of important Latin American writers who have worked within the genre, including Garbriel Garcia Márquez. For many of these writers, magical realism was a strategy for telling the distinct history of Latin America by placing legend and myth on the same level as historical fact.
This blending is evident from the very beginning of the story, when Melquíades and the band of travelers introduce the townspeople to both real and wondrous inventions, from ordinary telescopes and microscopes to flying carpets, alchemical tools, and impossibly strong magnets that send all metal in the village flying towards it. Fittingly, alchemy, with its characteristic mixture of science and magic, is a common motif in the novel.
Because supernatural phenomena occur so regularly throughout the novel, those characters living in Macondo barely react to them. When Remedios the Beauty ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, for instance, this surprising event is treated with no more astonishment by the other characters than if she had simply walked down the street:
No sooner had Remedios the Beauty ascended to heaven in body and soul than the inconsiderate Fernanda was going about mumbling to herself because her sheets had been carried off.
Here, the narrator notes Fernanda's surprisingly measured response to this shocking event. Rather than being astonished by Remedios's ascension, she is merely annoyed that Remedios "carried off" her sheets with her, even praying to God for their return. This is one of many examples of the novel's tendency, characteristic of magical realism, to depict extraordinary events with the same matter-of-fact tone as regular and mundane occurrences.
Related Themes:
