LITERATURE: 100 Years – Purpose

A writer talks to a reader, tells him a story that cannot help but include a part of himself, a way of thinking that he cannot completely escape from, even in fiction. 

"Aureliano continued getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers, whose names were Alvaro, German, Alfonso, and Gabriel, the first and last friends that he ever had in his life.  For a man like him, holed up in written reality, those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore and ended at dawn in the brothels were a revelation.  It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people…"  (p. four hundred sixteen)

In revealing a character, Marquez reveals his own view of human nature, instills in each the touch of this or that which makes us all unique, and at the same time, the same.  We all lust, but some get a tablespoon more of this element than others.  We all have fear, measured out and weighed against our strength and audacity.  Is this what Aureliano has learned locked in Melquiade’s room since shortly after the loss of Jose Arcadio Segundo?  Or are we learning something that Marquez himself is willing to share with us from his own experience as a writer.  What else about Aureliano–this latest son of Meme as well as all the Aurelianos before him, the Jose Arcadios as well–is pure Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Much, I’m sure.  But the skill is in that with only forty pages to the end of 100 Years of Solitude, I am only questioning that now.