The Heir Must Die: One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Gothic Novel
A brief survey of the salient conventions that distinguish the Gothic novel may convince readers of Gabriel GarcÃ-a MÃ¡rquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude that the book suits the genre. Reading Solitude as a Gothic novel not only yields a comprehensive interpretation but also heightens appreciation of its wit and craftsmanship. If the reader bears in mind the Gothic conventions dear to devotees of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Edgar Allan Poe canon, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, the reader will see how ably the Gothic conventions in any one of them can also pump the pedals of Pietro Crespi's pianola though the birds of magic realism sing other songs. Gothic novels began in romances, sentimental novels, and Oriental tales, notably The Thousand and One Nights.1 Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime added the most distant geographical reaches to the influence of Gothic architecture that in itself accentuated effects of spatial stress through contrasting light and dark, height and