Blog Post #7 - One Hundred Years of Solitude

"One night, when she could not sleep, Úrsula went out into the courtyard to get some water and she saw Prudencio Aguilar by the water jar. He was livid, a sad expression on his face, trying to cover the hole in his throat with a plug made of esparto grass. It did not bring on fear in her, but pity. She went back to the room and told her husband what she had seen, but he did not think much of it. “This just means that we can’t stand the weight of our conscience.” Two nights later Úrsula saw Prudencio Aguilar again, in the bathroom, using the esparto plug to wash the clotted blood from his throat. On another night she saw him strolling in the rain."

In this quote, Ursula is being tormented by the 'ghost' of Prudencio Aguilar, the man her husband had murdered for publicly disrespecting him. She sees him multiple times and after complaining to Jose Arcadio enough, he too sees the "dead man" while attempting to prove to his wife that the man was nothing more than a hallucination. In the world Gabriel Garcia Marquez has painted for us in the novel, it is possible to interact with the dead and much more. This is an example of "magical realism," which Marquez incorporates into his writing often and characterizes this entire novel. I was particularly interested in this scene because of how it reminds me of the Murder House from American Horror Story, the way in which the dead are completely present in the real world, able to interact with it and the people living in it, yet they are still 'ghosts.' These sort of confusing and mystical events are what classify One Hundred Years of Solitude as a magical realist fiction to me, where the reader is often not entirely sure whether the author is writing about clear magical fiction such as monsters or superheroes or realistic fiction such as To Kill a Mockingbird, but somewhere in between, where strange things happen but we are somewhat able to believe them due to the surreal nature of the entire book.