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Balthazar Marvellous Afternoon

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Balthazar Marvellous Afternoon
Q. Find out more about magic Realism. Do you think this story employs elements of magic realism?
Ans. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the most prolific writer of the twentieth century. Marquez adopts a distinctive narrative style in his writings which is popularly known as magic realism. It is a combination of myth, legend, dream and fantasy with a plot that has Verisimilitude.
Magic Realism is an extended view of Postmodernism. Postmodernism had been applied to the literature and art after World War writings II (1939-45), when the effects on western morale of the First World war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the coutntertraditional experiments of modernism. Art became a form of expressing ideas, political context was very strong in few cases. A movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as : omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view and clear- cut moral positions. It was a time when new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives and random-seeming collages of disparate materials. There was a tendency towards ‘reflexivity’, so that poems, plays and novels raise issues concerning their own nature, status and role. The overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation and innovation. An undertaking in some postmodernist writings, evidently present in Marquez, Balthazar’s Marvellous afternoon is of the literature of the absurd- is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thoughts and experience so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying ‘’abyss,’’ or ‘’void’’, or ‘’nothingness’’ on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended.
In simplest form, Magic Realism is when the magic blends with reality. It is the presentation of the magical as a

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