One Hundred Years of Solitude: Nostalgia as a Creation of the Text

Abstract

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Nostalgia as a Creation of the Text. This study examines the relationship between meaning and creativity in Gabriel Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude by focusing on the notion of nostalgia. Infusing memories with emotional significance, nostalgia is a creative act that revises the past to inscribe the present with meaning, so although nostalgic texts (revised memories) are created in solitude, they provide the opportunity for human solidarity. Some characters such as Ursula Buendia, use nostalgia to write themselves out of solitude while other characters, such as Colonel Aureliano Buendia, rejects nostalgia and remain trapped in their own solitude. Moreover, Melquiades parchments and the novel itself underscore the narrative creativity of nostalgia and collapse the distinction between nostalgic memories and the narrative discourses of fiction and history. Ultimately, nostalgia is less an attempt to recover in language what has been lost in time than it is a creative strategy of making sense of the world.