Magical Realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez uses "magical realism" to describe how beings behave humans with self-created loneliness. “Magical realism” [Note that the German art critic Franz Roh coined the term “magical realism” in 1925 to describe “a magical vision of reality”] [1] is the art of fascinating something that in the world real would not be possible and make it believable. It's very different from the magic of fairy tales, where things are quite surprising, unbelievable and exaggerated. Instead, magical realism makes magic seem more spiritual and ordinary. Gabriel García Márquez does a superb job of combining the truly surprising and magical with everyday life, so much so that the magic in Macondo seems normal. Gabriel García Márquez, in part, succeeds in "magical realism" because he makes ordinary events extraordinary, which makes them banal. Márquez uses a technique that allows magic. Realism works well in this novel because it uses an exaggerated lifestyle. Macondo is a magical place, which allows the characters not to notice the magic, especially the exaggerated life forms the reader to believe in the magic. The extent to which people in the era of the novel are surprising; this phenomenon is exemplified in Pilar Ternera's lifespan. «Years earlier, when he had turned one hundred and forty-five, he had given up the pernicious habit of keeping track of his age and continued to live in the static and marginal time of memories».(424) It is rare today for someone to live more than 100 years, and Pilar lives well beyond 145 years, yet she doesn't celebrate... middle of the card... magic is a normal occurrence and that there is no need for excitement. The characters are too caught up in their loneliness to notice how special and magical their village is. It is this perverse ability to remain isolated and shrouded in solitude that leads to their ultimate downfall. If they hadn't been so haunted by their loneliness and could have realized the wonderful world they lived in, they might have made the most of their magical gifts. But they didn't, and due to their ignorance, their lives and the village were destroyed. “…Because the races condemned to a hundred years of solitude have not had a second chance on earth.” (422)[1] Liberal Studies 402, Tuesday, March 28, 1995, by Ian Johnston (lecture)Works Cited: Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One hundred years of solitude. Trans. Gregorio Rabassa. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.