Truth, History and Myth in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract

This essay has as one of its main purposes an analysis of Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece, the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) regarded as the fictional space where the notions of truth, history and myth come together and get new meanings. Thus the Colombian writer reshapes, beyond Faulkner's or Borges' influence, not only the Latin American literary tradition of the "Boom", but also finds the perfect pattern for his work in Cervantes' Don Quixote as far as literary truth and the new kind of relationship between reality and fiction are concerned. Thus, the reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude is made, in turn, all-believing and alldoubting, both faithful and skeptical by this novel's fidelities to historical truth (or to any truth) and skepticisms, nothing else, in fact, then the perfect inheritor of Cervantes' knight's last will. And the most convincing evidence that, in its own way, One Hundred Years of Solitude addresses the delicate problems related to truth, but a very specific one: the truth of literature.