Back to Myth and Ethical Compromise: Garcia Marquez's Traces on Jeffrey Eugenides's the Virgin Suicides‪.‬

After locating US writer Jeffrey Eugenides against the background of recent minimalist fiction, this essay evaluates the influence of Garcia Marquez's narratives Cien anos de soledad and Cronica de una muerte anunciada on his first novel, The Virgin Suicides. Centered on the novel's magical-realist features, the contrastive analysis contends that The Virgin Suicides revives a distinctive modernist mythical impulse. Based on its literary borrowings, this impulse materializes in the endorsement of ancestral beliefs in a female principle and in the ethical demand to put an end to the gradual annihilation of the planet by post-industrial societies. Key words: magical realism, intertextuality, Jeffrey Eugenides, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, modernist anthropology, postmodernism, feminism, ethical turn.