The Labyrinth of Time and Metafiction: Deciphering Postmodern Elements in the Selected Works of Gabriel García Márquez

Abstract Gabriel Garcia Mrquez was among the most prominent Latin America writers of the twentieth century. He is well known for magical realism. However, his fiction was substantially entwined with postmodern aesthetics as well. This essay studies the postmodern characteristics of Mrquez through his works One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch, and it also refers to Chronicle of a Death Foretold.Definitely, magical realism is the main characteristic of his narrative voice and, apart from that, Marquez’s exploitation of temporal distortion, fragmentation, metafictional self, awareness, cyclical history, and intersexuality categorizes him among the postmodern discourse writers.By dismantling the linear sequence of events and questioning the trustworthiness of history, he not only challenges the Western 'myth of progress' but also discredits the grand narratives of colonial modernity.Referring to postmodern theorists like Jean, François Lyotard and Linda Hutcheon, the article argues that Marquez’s employment of fragmentation is not only a stylistic device; it is also a political and epistemological tactic. His narrative structures reflect the fragmented and marginalized Latin American world, thus revealing the fictional character of history and truth. In the end, his fiction straddles the line between magical realism and postmodernism, which in turn helps him to question narrative authority and transform historical consciousness.