Repetition as a Narrative Strategy in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract

All kinds of repetitions have some ends to fulfill in a literary work and those ends are attached to different kinds of things. The readers should think it as duty of theirs to bring out those ends, in other words meanings from their respective unexplored domains. The reader’s identification of repetitions may be deliberate or spontaneous, self-conscious or unreflective. What is said two or more times in a novel may not be true, but the reader can justify himself if he assumes it to be significant. Repetition as a single entity does not have any existence except in the mind which contemplates it. We can speak of repetition only by the virtue of the change or difference it introduces into our minds. So everything that comes to existence is totally different from each other. It is through the manipulation of time that an author is able to stick together the disparate events in a novel and is able to establish a connection among them by weaving the net of repetition around them. When the events are repeated again and again the time gap between them evaporates gradually. We are affected by the sameness and our judgment becomes biased. That is why we should observe these events as a single whole instead of looking at them as single entities. This particular paper will be making an attempt to place repetition as a narrative strategy by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.