A Distorted Reality Anonymous

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book about history and culture; the imaginary town of Macondo is based on the author's hometown of Aracataca, and the many events described in the novel - the civil unrest, the labor/commercial struggles, the technological changes - are historically accurate. Furthermore, Garcia Marquez’s narrative voice is borrowed: "The tone I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness" (Fields). It may seem safe to say that Garcia Marquez's novel is a work of reality, but this is not the case. Garcia Marquez's unique style – his inclusion of fantastic events, nonlinear development, free-flowing sentences – blurs the thin line between realism and fantasy by infusing the fictional with an aura of believability and the commonplace with an aura of magic. The resulting confusion leads to the creation of a distorted reality, which ironically reveals and contains some surprising truths.

The "blur" that marks the boundary between reality and unreality is dominated by Garcia Marquez's tone. Aside from the unperturbed...