The Living Parchment. The Reader as Character in One Hundred years of Solitude

Abstract

In addition to being the story of the Buendía family or Macondo or Latin America, One Hundred Years of Solitude is also the story of a multigenerational effort to read and understand Melquíades’ parchments, a text in which the characters’ destiny is foretold and explained. Using as a methodological instrument Paul Ricoeur’s interpretative Theory, particularly his approaches to Reception Theory, this paper aims to identify the textual strategies that involve the reader and make him or her a participant in the dynamics of the novel. The study concludes that the emphasis in representing the acts of reading and writing forces the reader to face an ethical problem: the fact that his or her role in the world is not only to read it, but also to write reality and his or her own personal narrative.