One Hundred Years of Solitude: Poetry and Myth

Abstract

It is possible to see the poetic and mythical condition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece, as one of the keys that explain its incredible universality. Its basis in the magical and prophetic translates into archetypes that can justify its transcendence and also its endurance beyond the time and the complexity of its particular labyrinth, organized around a central theme: The exorcism of death and the affirmation of the eternal return of the cycles of life. Like Don Quixote, One Hundred Years of Solitude was both the swan song of a genre -the chivalric novel and the magical realism, respectively- and at the same time its most lasting expression.