The Protean Viewpoint in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Point of view is a primary category of narrative, given that other elements such as characterization, description, language, worldview, structure, and genre, if they are to be convincing, need to be consistent with the adopted vantage point. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, where there is little direct dialogue, a polyvalent and multilayered diegesis, where an uncertain narrator recounts what different characters see, feel, and say, becomes a signature technique. According to Boris Uspensky, the “ideological point of view,” defined as the way of looking at the world conceptually, is not explicitly expressed, but found rather at the phraseological level of the narrative—marking a return to rhetorical criticism. “Many years later, before the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” From the outset, the viewpoint is marked by extreme shifts in person, character, time, tenses, and space, mapping its polyphony. This polyvalent narrator shifts from character to character, while the phraseology evokes different genres of the marvelous (myth, legend, folk tales, children’s stories, fairy tales, chronicles, travelogues, and ethnographic accounts). This overlay supports the verisimilitude of magical realist narrative. Ultimately the authorial mask is revealed to be Melquiades, himself a protean figure, a gypsy, merchant, explorer, ethnographer, inspired in Don Quixote’s Cide Hamete Benengeli. The narrator’s worldview coincides with the characters, such that no one shows surprise before the supernatural. The ideology appears naive, provincial, rural, primitive, and akin to outsider art, while maintaining a sophisticated technique.