Time in House of spirits and chronicle of a death foretold

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The fragmentation of time is a major characteristic portrayed in Latin American literature.  Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende highlight the significant impact that time has on narrative.  Time plays a role in the development of both novels through firstly structuring the books.  This structure is by no means linear, but a recurring notion of themes.  The numerous instances of foreshadowing and flashback have a great impact on both novels’ development.  The thought of the past and future as closely entwined also lays the basis for fate, as repetition leads the reader to believe that the future is set and uncontrollable.  Time also gives the reader an insight into the recollection of the past and how witnesses can be unreliable.  These two novels portray different methods of remembering the past.  In Chronicle, Márquez interviews people who were there at the time whilst in House of the Spirits Allende uses diaries as documented testimonies.  

The cyclical structure of both novels means that they flip between the past and future.  In the House of the Spirits the transition between times is used to give different viewpoints as it follows a family over several generations.  The structure of the big house on the corner in the House of the Spirits is a metaphor for the structure of the entire novel. Esteban builds a house that on the surface is straightforward, if somewhat pretentious. Similarly, The House of the Spirits can be read as a traditional romance novel, following a single family over several generations. However, the narrator informs us as Esteban builds the house that it will end up full of complicated, twisted, and impractical additions. Despite its apparently traditional structure, The House of the Spirits contains an enormous number of complicated twists of plot. The title of the novel underlines the association: The House of the Spirits refers both to the book as a whole and also to the big house on the corner, which, thanks to Clara, is always full of ghosts and spirits.

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While much of The House of the Spirits seems to have very straightforward third-person ("he/she") narration, in fact there are three distinct narrative voices in the novel. The first voice is that of an unnamed first person ("I") narrator whom the reader does not discover is Alba until the epilogue. From this narrator's opening paragraph, the reader is made aware that this account has been reconstructed from Clara's notebooks. After this disclosure, however, the majority of reconstruction is told in the third person, with all characters referred to as "he" or "she." This second narrative voice is omniscient, or "all-knowing," ...

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