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Gabriel García Márquez's Magical Realism

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Life and Death. These elements, on opposite ends of the human experience, both subvert all rationalism and reason. Gabriel García Márquez explores this sacred territory in his literature claiming that life and death have no boundaries and that the line separating these two disparate human elements is essentially a fantasy. García Márquez communicates this idea through his magical-realism style of literature, allegory, and symbolism illustrated in a collection of short stories, The Sea of Lost Time, The Other Side of Death, and his novel Love in the Time of Cholera.
García Márquez is a storyteller who is committed to revealing the truth about life. Through elaborate metaphors and dense symbolism, García Márquez conveys his interpretation of life and death by going beyond the realm of everyday reality and passing into a supernatural domain; from entering mythical territories in The Sea of Lost Time, to journeying through a man’s unorthodox consciousness in The Other Side of Death. Although he takes his audience to a fictional universe he is still able to mirror reality. As he stated in The Fragrance of the Guava: Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “I believe the imagination is just an instrument for producing reality and that the source of creation is always, in the last instance, reality.” This theme of ‘magical realism’ is reflected throughout García Márquez’s literature and is an essential device he utilizes for connecting two conflicting human components, life and death.
Entering the world of fantasy, in his short story The Sea of Lost Time, García Márquez twists reality and physically positions the land of the dead among the living to illustrate the nonexistent boundaries …show more content…

Is this the attainment of love in old age or a mere fantasy, something real or something

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