City Of The Beast By Isabel Allende Analysis

A man sans a story is world less. A story sans a narration is word less. The origin of story begins from the word ‘Kun’ (meaning ‘being’ in Arabic). This universe, since genesis, has never been devoid of stories. Stories constitute selfhood, rectitude, audacity, frailty, fidelity, power, guile, infamy, etc. They perturb with cacophonous reality and bemuse with their beguiling falsity. They forge senses to trot on oblique planes and sojourn somewhere into wilderness. The centroidal artery of Homo sapiens community turfs in narrating adventures, allegories, anecdotes, epics, fairy tales, legends and myths. Stories transcend time and space.

Narration or narrative technique, being a subsistent art of storytelling, underpins a vision or an ideology.

Featuring multiple themes this fictional work is engrossed in adventure and magical realism. The Chilean- American author has penned the novel in such a way that the journey navigates the readers into the wilderness of the Amazon in a Conradian style. Alexander Cold, due to unforeseen circumstances, has to resort under his grandmother’s shelter until his mother’s recovery from illness. The fifteen year old adolescent finds it difficult to be in the company of his tenacious magazine reporter- grand mother Kate Cold, who joins the expedition crew to the Amazon. The expedition troop comprises the anthropologist Dr. Ludovic Leblanc, the beautiful Venezuelan doctor Omayra Torres, the photographer Timothy Bruce, his assistant Joel Gonzalez, the Brazilian guide Cesar Santos, and his twelve year old daughter Nadia. The voyage is funded by the magazine International Geographic. The group en routes the path of erstwhile explorers to purview El Dorado, the mythical gold city and to trace Yeti, the mysterious

Faris’ Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative is a seminal work reconnoitering the treatment of magical realism in contemporary fictions. This critical work distinguishes the definition of the term, its characteristics, significance, theoretical perspectives, narrative techniques, cultural politics, gender relations, dynamics of postcolonial alterity and focuses on writers including Juan Rulfo, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Patrick Suskind, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo and Isabel Allende. Faris in her Ordinary Enchantments proclaims her aims “to explore the importance of magical realism in contemporary literature...by describing the characteristics that define, the techniques...(and) providing additional proof of the significance of magic realism in contemporary literature” (pp. 4-5). In this work, Faris proposes the “five characteristics of magical realism” as irreducible element, presence of the phenomenal world, unsettling doubts, merging realms, and disruptions of time, space and identity (Ordinary Enchantments 3). This paper attempts to locate the fluidity of time, space and identity based on Faris’ final characteristic of magical