Using Diagrammatic Drawings to Understand Fictional Spaces: Exploring the Buendía House in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract

Fictional spaces described in literary texts are unique in that their spatial information is always underspecified, leaving readers with the task of filling in the unspecified details. While ways in which readers fill in unspecified elements have been proposed, very little empirical work has been done to examine the process. This paper presents an empirical study of how readers fill in unspecified details of fictional spaces described in literary texts. We asked readers to draw diagrams of the Buendía family home in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Diagrams were analyzed to inventory the spatial elements that were depicted across several readers. The results indicate that readers fill in the spatial details of fictional spaces using their own culturally-specific understanding of similar real world spaces, and that narrative events also assign prominence and detail to certain areas within a fictional space. Using diagrams to understand fictional spaces is discussed from a pedagogical perspective.