Similarities and Differences of Love Relationships - Essay Example

Similarities and Differences of love relationships in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epic novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, narrates the family history of a native South American family, the Buendias. This narrative is not merely a genealogical fiction, but also a historical allegory and an autobiography at the same time. Not only does this novel belong to multiple genres but it has several themes as well, such as love, death, time, culture and nature, solitude, history, identity, progress, innocence et cetera. The Sun Also Rises, written by Ernest Hemingway fifty years earlier is about American and British expatriates traveling to Pamplona from Paris to watch bullfights and running of the bulls at the Festival of San Fermin. Marquez, like many writers was deeply influenced by Hemingway’s style of writing: “…the best thing about his stories is that they give the impression something is missing, and this is precisely what confers their mystery and their beauty.” (Boon 2008) Both the novels are similar as well as different in the projection of love as a theme. While Hemingway is trying to project the effect of war on the next generation’s relationships, Marquez is propounding on the impact of modernism on the age bands. The greatness of One Hundred Years of Solitude lies not in the vastness of its scope, nor in the novelty and poetic sense of its style but in the universal validity of the ideas it puts forward. Jose Arcadio Buendia fell in love with his first cousin, Ursula Iguarin, and married her despite the prohibition of incest in their community. Driven by guilt Jose Arcadio Buendia travels with Ursula far away from his home and establishes a village in a remote isolated piece of land and names it Macondo. Soon they have children and the village is populated by other immigrants. Their lives revolve around a typical traditional lifestyle: man seeks living and brings it home, woman takes care of home and children, children grow up watching their parents and follow in their footsteps to keep the tradition alive. But the problem is that Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursala did not keep the tradition alive. They broke away from it. Macondo is established because of a violation of the established normative structure; its doom is sealed in its beginning. The family suffers from an insomnia plague: “a loss of memory… when the sick person became used to this state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past.”(Marquez, Ch.3, 1970) The plague spreads throughout their home and eventually all over the village. People spend a long period of time without sleep. In the beginning they are glad to be inflicted by the plague because, “there was so much to do in Macondo in those days that there was barely enough time” to sleep (Marquez, 1970). Later it starts to kill them all. The Sun Also Rises, however, is a love story revolving around Jake Barnes, also the narrator in the novel, and Lady Brett Ashley, a licentious woman who nursed him during World War I injury. What makes this a different love story than Marquez’s is that Jake and Brett never get together in the novel. Brett only wishes it was the case, towards the end of the novel. It is their disconnectedness that brings ruin in everyone’s, especially Brett’s life. Cohn, a rich Jewish writer and friend of Jake who has a dominant girlfriend, also falls prey to Brett’s coquetry. Jake thinks Cohn has never been able to sustain a relationship for long. “For four years his horizon had been absolutely limited to his wife. For three years, or almost three years, he had never seen beyond Frances. I am sure he had never been in love in his life.” (Hemingway, Ch. 2, 1954) Brett, on the other hand, is too selfish. Jake’s impotency drifts her apart from him and she has no control over her own emotions when it comes to men. Hemingway shows several relationships entangled due to loss of human sentiments. Jake is cynical about love and relationships and thinks that they are like bills that need to be paid off as transactions. “…I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on…” (Hemingway, Ch. 14, 1954) In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez shows that characters confuse “passion” with “love” something similar to what Brett alone undergoes in most part of Hemingway’s novel. “The relationship of jolly comradeship was born between father and daughter … Aureliano Segundo postponed any appointments in order to be with Meme, to take her to the movies or the circus, and he spent the greater part of his idle time with her. . . The discovery of his daughter restored his former joviality and the pleasure of being with her was slowly leading him away from dissipation. [Petra Cotes] was so annoyed with the comradeship between her lover and his daughter that she did not want anything to do with her. Petra was tormented by an unknown fear, as if instinct were telling her that Meme, by just wanting it, could succeed in what Fernanda had been unable to so: deprive her of a love that by then she considered assured until death” (Marquez, Ch. 14, 1970) The filial love and sexual love are two kinds of love reflected in the novel; one that lives with a person after death and the other that dies with the person. Most of the characters fail to understand the difference between sexual attraction and a committed relationship involving compromise. The similarity that one sees in both the novels lies in the effect of love on the generations. What makes them different is their surroundings and community to which the characters belong. Marquez’s is a more metaphorical world where dream is a reality. Hemingway portrays love as an injured party of fate. Works Cited Boon, Kevin A. Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises and Other Works. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2008. Print pp, 115-116 Garci?a, Ma?rquez G. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1954. Print. Read More