Literature 202

Literature 202

The primary theme of the paper is Literature 202 in which you are required to emphasize its aspects in detail. The cost of the paper starts from $99 and it has been purchased and rated 4.9 points on the scale of 5 points by the students. To gain deeper insights into the paper and achieve fresh information, kindly contact our support.

Garcia Marquez & Kafka: Extra Credit Journal

Read the following excerpt from The Paris Review interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez from 1981. With the interview as context for your own reading of The Metamorphosis and “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” write a journal analyzing the tone of the two stories. What is the effect of this tone on the story? What techniques from Kafka do you see in Garcia Marquez’s work? What is the point of all this dead pan magical realism?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

When I entered college I happened to have a very good literary background in general, considerably above the average of my friends. At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

I had an idea of what I always wanted to do, but there was something missing and I was not sure what it was until one day I discovered the right tone—the tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. When I finally discovered the tone I had to use, I sat down for eighteen months and worked every day.

INTERVIEWER

How did she express the “fantastic” so naturally?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.

Interviewed by Peter H. Stone

use Kafka, and Marquez as primary sources

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