The Reliability of the Narrator in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Gabriel Garcia Marguez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract

In the simultaneously fantastic and earthly world of the magical-realist novel, where telepathic powers are discovered through the clearing of snot, or where girls ascend to heaven while hanging out the laundry, how do the narrators of Gabriel García Márquez’s <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em> and Salman Rushdie’s <em>Midnight’s Children</em> attempt to convince the reader of the narratives’ reliability? Can the reader really rely on the truth of such fantastic narratives? If not, what precisely are García Márquez and Rushdie trying to tell us about the nature of supposedly reliable narrative and the truths it purports to contain