"Desmantelamiento e integracion de las dicotomias en ""Cien anos de soledad"""
"The purpose of this study is to show how in Cien anos de soledad Gabriel Garcia Marquez exposes and subverts a traditional system of thought that tries to reduce the multiplicity of human experience to dychotomical antagonisms and strict hierarchies. The first part of this work summarily views the trajectory of what I have called ""dychotomical (line of) thought"", one that can be traced to the Greeks and permeates all our Occidental epistemology and one that emphasizes the neat paradigms of binary logic. I also review recent schools of thought--deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial criticism--that have systematically questioned the claims of universality of such a representational model. The second part of my study is a survey of some of the very opposed and contradictory interpretations of Cien anos de soledad's view of history and the relationship between its textuality and the world-view it represents. In my third chapter, I analyze some of the innumerable dychotomies that function within the text at very different levels: thematic (social and political dychotomies), structural, or both (center-periphery relationships). My conclusions suggest that throughout the novel, binary oppositions are presented as useless and/or destructive: like the Buendia twins, opposites merge and become confused with one another. The protagonists of this post-colonial saga only find clarity very briefly, usually minutes before their death, when they openly realize that the binary/ideological oppositions that had governed their lives (love/hate; liberal/conservative; executioner/victim) are but empty linguistic manifestations of a same lack and a same solitude. This interpretation is consistent with the very formal configuration of the text: the combination of realism and myth characteristic of ""magical realism"" implies an integration of two seemingly opposed representational codes, both of which function simultaneously."
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign