they, too, have met these Gypsies and seen carpets fly. But Ursula suddenly turns oddly elegiacal: "What's happening," she tells Aureliano Segundo, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and these things don't come here any more."
This is both true and untrue. It is certainly true that the world of Macondo is coming to an end; the reader senses this already. But miracles remain virtually commonplace in the village. Despite her nostalgia for past wonders, Ursula will remain undaunted when Aureliano's gorgeous but half-witted sister Remedios is carried off in her bed sheets to heaven (223). In Garcia Marquez's world, even the ghosts of the dead come and go with little fanfare. Such incidents are described with a matter-of-factness which would horrify Tom Wolfe. But does Wolfe have legitimate cause for alarm? And what is Garcia Marquez's motive in such free use of the fantastic?
Claudette Kemper Columbus touches on this question in her striking essay, "The Heir Must Die: One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Gothic Novel." Her belief that Garcia Marquez's novel belongs to the Gothic tradition is partly supported by Garcia Marquez's praise of a familiar Gothic classic. ". . . I left Fidel Castro a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula," she quotes him as saying, "which is an absolutely fantastic book but one that intellectuals consider unworthy."
Columbus finds plenty of interpretive fodder in a Gothic reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude. For example, Gothic novels tend to blur the inner and the outer lives of their characters, the life of the mind and the life of the surrounding physical environment:
Therefore bearing his earth-filled coffins from port to port, Dracula and his terrain become literally one, the flight-and-pursuit pattern openly presented as fused to territoriality, conquest. . .
As an example from One Hundred Years of Solitude, Columbus speaks of "Rebeca's carrying with her the bones of her unk...