The Fantastic in Fiction

The novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was an extremely fantastical novel with so many forms of fantastic within. My favorite fantastical detail of this world that Gabriel García Márquez creates is the magical forest that once the men slash to get through, the plants already begin growing back. The forest is described as if it is alive. Another repeated source of the fantastic in the novel that changes the reality of nature is the many crazy weather patterns that occur. There is unnatural heat, they have rain for a straight five years which diminish their crops and land in the process, and different weather that is considered magical plagues. Another altered reality would be that the fertility of farm animals being affected by sleeping with a particular woman, which of course is fantastic. Very far from our world, it is fantastic how the women come to Macondo with new inventions that have never been seen before, how ice had never been introduced before, and how back then in their world, many items and objects did not have names to call them yet. Also, although incest itself is not fantastic, the fantastical piece of many instances of incest in the book is how often it occurs and how it almost becomes a normality when reading it, whereas, in reality, it is not even close to a normal occurrence. The presence of creatures is fantastic and also, the way the village itself came to be in fantastic, and how their town is isolated from the rest of the world. The idea of a gypsy ghost and telling prophecies are both fantastical. And, lastly, as Aureliano (II) is reading the history of the Buendia family and the history of Macondo, it says what Aureliano (II) was doing at that very moment, and reality is ripped away! Such a thing that would have written what you are doing right now in the present is unrealistic and fantastical, along with reality tearing apart with that discovery, and the destruction of the entire world we have been within during the whole novel.