One Hundred Years of Solitude and Mignight's Children

This study will examine Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, focusing on how the main characters' communities evolve, and how the impact of the outside world influences them. Neither author is optimistic with respect to the happiness, peace or prosperity of the communities they portray or the people in those communities. Rushdie's Saleem Sinai was born in Bombay but his community is in fact all of India. The community of Saleem in this national context is portrayed by Rushdie as having been a disastrous failure in its efforts to find freedom and justice in independence. As a part of a poverty-stricken country led by politicians portrayed by Rushdie as thoroughly corrupt, if not insane, Bombay or any other community is condemned to the same miserable fate as the nation as a whole. Similarly, Macondo in Garcia Marquez's book is a symbolic community representing all of Latin America and its failure to bring a good life to its people in the century covered. Garcia Marquez focuses not on one character but on the Buendia family through the generations.

Both novels suggest that outside influences (for example, the effects of English colonialism and the war with Pakistan in Rushdie, and the United States in Garcia Marquez) play roles in the communities' failures, but internal chaos seems to be more important than those external powers.

Garcia Marquez creates the world of the Buendias in the evolving realm of Macondo in

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e was over, . . . three thousand dead people had been thrown into the sea, . . . and . . . Macondo finally had peace after many years" (Garcia Marquez 390). However, the author follows this declaration of peace with a virtual list of images of corruption and squalor: a "prostrate red-light district," money burning to "liven up the revels," and "deserted dance halls adorned with the remnants of wreaths" (390). Both authors mock war and any notion that political or other ideals could ever justify the suffering and madness of war. Such conflicts and their bloody results are shown to be a primary reason for the failure of these communities to develop effectively and humanely. For instance, in Garcia Marquez, a discussion between Colonel Aureliano Buendia and Colonel Gerineldo Marquez focuses on the rationale for war. Marquez says he is fighting for "the great Liberal party," while Buendia admits to fighting for "pride." Marquez says, "That's bad," and Buendia agrees, but adds, "It's better than fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone" (139). Not only does most war itself not have any meaning for anyone, but it prevents the development of communities and human beings, delivering death and destruction

Category: Literature - O