Isolationism Explored in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

Isolation is a very common issue that many writers juggle with in their writings. It can be found in Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Both of these literature works contain the concept of isolation as well as its resulting effect on the subjects. These two works presented the use of isolationism differently. Kafka only wrote about the one "person" forced into isolation by others else while Marquez wrote about an entire community forced by a few into suclusion. However, the ending results were still the same-the extended isolations of Gregor Samsa and the city of Macondo eventually led to their downfalls through a chain reaction of events.

After waking up to find "himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" (Kafka 1), Gregor could only think about the repercussions of being late for work. He made numerous futile attempts at trying to get out of bed safely so that he could "put on his clothes and above all eat his breakfast" (7). However, after the chief clerk came to check up on him and Gregor's condition was revealed, Gregor was forced into isolation by his father, who "had merely the fixed idea of driving Gregor back into his room as quickly as possible" (31). The process of being forced into isolation inflicted a lot of physical pain onto Gregor because of his enormous size and unfamiliarity with the proportions of his new body.

Macondo on the other hand was not forced to go into isolation by a greater force. Quite the contrary, it secluded itself from the rest of the world by only a few people within the community. Though not everyone in Macondo wanted to be isolated, those in power, the Buendia family, made the differences because what they did affects the rest of the city. This state of isolation was not desired by Jose Arcadio Buendia as he cursed, "God damn it! Macondo is surrounded by water on all sides" (Marquez 13). However, after a series of events including the insomnia plague, the town found itself hopelessly in a state of solitude. As Jose Arcadio Buendia slowly goes into a state of solitude with his alchemy, the rest of Macondo follows suit like a chain of reaction.

A chain reaction could also be found in the Samsa family as a result of locking Gregor away. Gregor started to become more and more like a bug, and it was evident in his selection of food. Foods he once liked were unbearable to him. He even rejected his favorite drink-milk, "although milk had been his favorite drink and that was certainly why his sister had set it there for him, indeed it was almost with repulsion that he turned away from the basin and crawled back to the middle of the room" (Kafka 32). Gregor adapted to his new solitary state from the rest of the family realizing that he will always be repulsive to his family no matter how long he has been a bug. He then grew accustomed to his new state slowly and soon learned that he liked to crawl around the room and suspend himself from the roof. By this time, he had already adjusted to his new body and was able to control it better and falling from the roof does him no harm. However, because of his new hobby, his sister was determined to clear his room so that he could have more room to crawl around.

Destruction took a lot longer to fall upon Macondo than it did on Gregor mainly because Macondo is an entire community while Gregor is just one "person". There were many cases of individual isolations that were needed to isolate the whole community of Macondo. Jose Arcadio Buendia gets influenced by the traveling gypsy Melquiades and slowly retreats back into his scientific pursuits instead of completing his responsibilities as a leader of a community. "Having completely abandoned his domestic obligations, he spent entire nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars and he almost contracted sunstroke from trying to establish an exact method to ascertain noon." (Marquez 4)

Though his sister may have cleared his room with good intentions, Gregor soon realized that "They were clearing his room out; taking away everything he loved" (55). Another chain of reactions then led to the immediate cause for Gregor's downfall-the apple that sunk itself into his back and "impaired, probably for ever, his powers of movement" (64). This was a result of Gregor's actions to help his fainting mother-a break from his designated room of isolation. After getting a glimpse of outside his room again, Gregor "was often haunted by the idea that next time the door opened he would take the family's affairs in hand again just as he used to do; once more, after this long interval" (69). The desire to break from his isolated state was fueled by the sounds of music flowing from the violin that his sister played for the lodgers. His emergence to the lodgers was the last straw for his family as his sister blurted out, "we must try to get rid of it." (82) Soon afterwards, he died in his isolated environment, alone.

This action by Jose Arcadio Buendia started to be noticeable to the other citizens of Macondo and they "were startled at how much he had changed under Melquiades' influence" (9). His "spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time" (10) and that started to affect the way that the community lived since many "left work and family to follow him" (10) in his pursuit of the advancement of science. After a long period of repercussions of isolationism including the banana company and the insomnia plague, Aureliano Babylonia's similar isolated state finally depicted the doom of Macondo. He sat into the rocking chair that contained so much of his family's past and was overwhelmed by all of it. However, through this action he was able to finally decipher Melquiades' parchments that his forefathers have spent so much time in isolation attempting to solve. Nonetheless, the end result of the parchment was the end of the once self-sufficient town.

According to both Kafka and Marquez, extended isolated states will lead to the destruction of ones self. From both these examples, isolation led to destruction even though the causes of their seclusions were different. Marquez wrote that "races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." (448) Gregor eventually crawled his life away in pain and Macondo eventually crumbled under its own isolation-both never got a second chance at redemption.