Social Isolation as a Cause of Incest in Latin American Fiction

Abstract

In his One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the Latin American writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez depicts the Buendia family, whose members seem to have a great difficulty marrying and developing sexual relationships with characters outside this family. Marquez portrays these characters as such in order to represent incest and connect it with the social behavior of individuals.  The present paper, then, is an attempt to prove that through depicting male as well as female characters as unable to establish healthy relationships with people outside the family, Marquez seems to show that social isolation is one of the key causes to social aberration.