Signalling Identity: Between Autobiography and Fiction: Narrating the Self in Gabriel García Márquez's Vivir para contarla.

In my paper I wish to look at the ways in which Gabriel García Márquez portrays his life story in the autobiography Living to Tell the Tale (2003). Throughout the autobiography, everything is seen in relation to his formation as a writer of fiction, a perspective which is emphasised by deliberately echoing episodes and characters from his fiction. For example, in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the village Macondo is 'built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like pre-historic eggs,' while the autobiography's Aracataca is 'located on the banks of a river of transparent water that raced over a bed of polished stones as huge and white as pre-historic eggs.' While One Hundred Years of Solitude uses a proleptic narrative figure ('Many years later'), the autobiography uses the formula 'I remember'; within the form of the autobiography, García Márquez's life is remembered and recounted as integrated parts of the fictive worlds of prolepsis, which he has spent his life constructing, and which in the meantime have become parts of his own past of lived life, a life he can only render autobiographically, by paradoxically using a fictive, pseudo-iterative mode of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]