Comparing One Hundred Years Of Solitude And Orhan Pamuk's

Videos and social media posts pour out of East Aleppo, and the world weeps. For the seven-year-old girl facing her death, for the man seeking prayers as a bomb explodes in the distance, for the activist pleading, “Save Aleppo. Save humanity.” The aerial footage of the city is apocalyptic, but it is the images of individuals grasping for hope as they face death that has truly captured and horrified the masses. We have seen this before: the figures leaping from the World Trade Center, the story of Anne Frank and her family, the tear-soaked faces in countless images of countless massacres. It is the human loss that is striking, the fact that real, ordinary people were part of some massive, historical event. This raises questions, though. How do we reconcile the individual with mass atrocity? How can we make the private individual fit within the cold, public expanse of history? Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow consider the relationship between individual identity and collective, historical tragedy, …show more content…
Individuals lose their identity in a historical context, but the collective has power even over history, able to rewrite it for its own purposes. Overall, Márquez seems to support this reworking and discarding of history, as we see, for example, in the end of the Buendías line at the close of the novel. The novel, thus, advocates change, a modernization and democratization of the world. The depictions of massacre in the two novels, overall, differ in their perspectives on individualism and history. Snow grants recognition and agency to the individual (though he also represents the collective and the historical as powerful), whereas One Hundred Years of Solitude asserts that the individual is lost in the historical, which in turn may be influenced by the