Essay Topic:

The description and analysis of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s life.

Essay Questions:

Why is Gabriel Garcia Marquez considered to be Pride of Colombia? How did Gabriel Garcia Marquez participate in the fight for independence? Who is considered the most important man in the writer’s life? Who had the greatest influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a future writer?

Thesis Statement:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known all over the world as a writer, but it addition to being a novelist and short story writer he is also a journalist.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez biography

 

"…I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents..."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Introduction: The man, that can be called without any doubts:” The Pride of Colombia”, was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a town situated in the northern part of Colombia. His name is Gabriel Garcia Marquez.This man is known all over the world as a writer, but it addition to being a novelist and short story writer he is also a journalist. A little boy, that was by brought up by his maternal grandparents Colonel Ricardo Marquez and Tranquilina Cotes due to the poverty of his parents turned out to be one of the brightest minds Colombia has ever showed to the world and a Nobel laureate. His grandfather Colonel Ricardo Marquez was a person who deeply influenced the young wit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His grandfather inspired him for some of his works, for he was a man of a great past and a lot of experience, a man that admired Simon Bolivar, a hero of the fight for independence. Grandfather’s admiration and all the stories that he told Miguel were of a great impact on his future writings. It was the first Garcia’s step towards his ”love to realism”.

As his grandfather and he lived in Aracataca, known as the “banana zone” this place and everything that took place in it, from the stories of his grandfather also influenced his works later on. This man is the “main figure” of Garcia’s life, for he not only taught him “to speak. Garcia’s grandmother had a lesser influence on her grandson, but she was a very interesting woman with an outstanding and original ability to tell false superstitious stories, as if she had seen in with her very own eyes. This taught the young future novelist a lot. At the age of 8 he his grandfather dies and he return to his parents, starts going to a boarding school. He enjoyed reading and loved to study. Later on he went to study law and journalism, but at the University he did not show any interest in what he was studying. Nevertheless, he continued reading a lot, almost anything he could get. He produced his first story in 1946, it was "The Third Resignation". Later, when he studied in Cartagena he worked in a newspaper "El Universal” so he started working as a journalist. He worked all over the Latin America. Got married to Mercedes Pardo in 1958 after being engaged since she was a child. It took his quiet a time before he found “his own way of writing” and it all started with “One hundred years of solitude”(1967) and it was the success Gabriel Garcia Marquez was waiting for his whole life. He also showed himself as a political activist, his main goal was to change something around him, to make the world better for the people for he was so tired of all the Colombia’s fights. He wanted to eliminate abuses brought by the political terrible affect on people. He had years of chases and “coming back”. In 1986 “Love in the Time of Cholera” was published, based on the life of his own parents. He was a man with a brightest personality ever and not only a magnificent writer. Nowadays he has lymphatic cancer and he spends a lot of time in different clinics.

Conclusion: Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a man that did not just retell “reality”, he “drew” reality and nothing but reality in his magnificent, perfect in the literature sense Spanish language. In a way that cannot be compared to anything, in a way that only a boy brought up by this wonderful grandparent of his could write. He showed “Colombia’s truth”. He showed everything exactly in the way it was without adding anything spare. His works are “nude” in a sense that they are see-through; they do not depict reality for they are reality. His works reflect the political situation of his country. The constant bloody fights for power, deaths and the hopeless people. His works show what was hidden, but not forgotten by thousand of people, for example Banana Strike Massacre of 1928 (in “One hundred years of Solitude”). He showed troops firing people without any guns and people who tried to change the smallest thing they could. Living through "the Violence" in Colombia when towns were burned and women and children murdered made his describe life just in the way it was, being sometimes too “natural” and even shocking. He was the man that gave the start to a new literature trend – the Magic Realism. A man who only wrote about what he observed.