Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

conduct an analysis of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

As with our second essay, the third and final assignment of the semester builds on the work that we’ve done previously. In other words, Essay Three asks you to conduct a close reading and critical analysis (as required for Essay One), and to consider the connections between one text and another (a skill which we honed while writing Essay Two). You might also remember that we often made sense of these texts by contextualizing them – by considering the subtle ways in which Vonnegut might be responding to other books about World War II, for example, or the fact that Mary Shelley might be commenting on the controversies of her time.

Essay Three invites you to conduct an analysis of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Your inquiry should culminate in an original, analytical thesis claim which incorporates one or more texts that we have not read in class.

Since there are several ways to approach this assignment, I’ve suggested some prompts below which might help you focus your research. You may start with one of these prompts or take a different approach if you’re so inclined.

1.As you know, reflections and representations play an important role in 100YOS. We might even go so far as to consider the book itself a sort of mirror. What, according to your research and analysis, does it reflect?

2. “You had to be in the 1960’s…to understand now what impact the first page of that book [100YOS] had,” Gerald Martin told National Public Radio. “It just seemed to me a kind of writing that everyone was waiting for, [but] they didn’t know they were waiting for it – it was just one of those zeitgeist things.” How, according to your research and analysis, does 100YOS speak to the culture in which it was written?

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3. Consider conducting a lens comparison of 100YOS using another literary text. Your “lens text” might be short story by one of Marquez’s influences – Franz Kafka (using a text other than the “The Metamorphosis”), for example, or William Faulkner – or by Marquez himself.

Regardless of the option that you choose, remember that the general reader hasn’t necessarily read the second text; therefore, please be sure to summarize each text so that the reader can follow.

As with the previous essays, please ensure that Essay Three is organized, concise, grammatically-correct and properly cited using the MLA Citation Style. This essay should be between four and six pages.