One Of These Days

Gabriel García Márquez is best known for his use of magical realism—a literary genre in which fabulous or fantastical events are narrated as commonplace in a realistic narrative tone—in short stories like “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” or his Nobel-prize-winning 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, the narrative style of his early literary works, like “One Of These Days,” draws upon the conventions of Neorealism to critique contemporary social realities.

Neorealism (sometimes also called Social Realism) was developed in Italian film and literature at the end of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s in response to the decline of Fascism. The movement spread throughout Europe and Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. Neorealism (neo meaning new) represents a rebirth of realistic or true-to-life narratives in both film and fiction. Two hallmarks of neorealist works are that they present scenes from everyday life and that they focus on social realities, reflecting the lived experiences of the majority rather than those of the privileged few (Buchanan, Ian. “Neorealism.” A Dictionary of Critical Theory 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 2018). García Márquez became familiar with Neorealism during the mid-1950s when he spent