The Comparison of One Hundred Years of Solitude with Things Fall Apart Justin J.R.K. Kirkey

By Justin J.R.K. Kirkey

An Involved Essay: The Comparison of

One Hundred Years of Solitude with Things Fall Apart

Things - and societies - fall apart. Societies are born; they grow, thrive, decline, and finally perish. Their procession through these phases, though, can be very different. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that tells the story of the rise and fall of the Buendia family, can be compared with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, a novel that tells the story of a man whose world slowly disintegrates around him. Both novels share the major overarching themes of social disintegration and change, but differ in the ways that the two described societies deal with that change. Other points of contract between the novels are the way they treat the roles of men and women in society, isolationism vs. internationalism, fate vs. free will, and supernatural events.

In both novels, the reader experiences the progress and decline of a civilization. In Things Fall Apart, reader learns early on about the status of the Igbo people of Umuofia, in Africa. "Umuofia was feared by all its neighbors. It was powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine men were feared in all the...