International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention (IJHSSI) ISSN (Online): 2319 – 7722, ISSN (Print): 2319 – 7714 www.ijhssi.org ||Volume 9 Issue 6 Ser. III || June 2020 || PP 38-40 DOI: 10.35629/7722-0906033840 www.ijhssi.org 38 | Page Hope and Despair in the Select Works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Sreejith Ramachandran 1 , K.Rajkumar 2 PhD Research Scholar 1 , Assistant Professor 2 PG and Research Department of English, Nehru Arts and Science College (Autonomous) Coimbatore-105. ABSTRACT: No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella written by the Colombian novelist and Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It also gives its name to an anthology of short stories. García Márquez held it to be his best book. It is the tale of a poverty stricken, retired Colonel, a veteran of the Thousand Days ’ War, who still hopes that he would soon receive the pension he was promised fifteen years ago. The Colonel lives with his wife, who is asthmatic, in a small village under martial law. The General in his Labyrinth is a fictionalization of the last seven months of Simon Bolivar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia by Garcia Marquez. The book traces Bolivar’s final journey from Bogota to the Caribbean coastline of Colombia in his attempt to leave South America for exile in Europe. The story explores the labyrinth of Bolivar’s life through the narrative of his memories, in which despair, sickness and death inevitably win out over love, health and life. Hope is a positive perspective that depends on a desire for good results as for occasions and conditions in a person's life or the world as a whole. As a verb hope means: "expect with certainty" and "to value a longing with expectation." The Psychologist Charles R. Snyder connected hope with the presence of an objective, joined with a decided arrangement for achieving that objective. The opposite of hope is “despair”, which is feeling that nothing is left for oneself in the world, or rather purposelessness in life. This paper attempts to explore the theme of hope and despair in these works from a psychological perspective by applying C R Snyder’s Hope Theory. KEYWORDS: Hope, Determination, Despair, Purpose in life, Psychology. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of Submission: 07-06-2020 Date of Acceptance: 22-06-2020 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. INTRODUCTION On March 6, 1928, Aracataca, in Northern Colombia, saw the birth of the person who was to overcome the universe of writing, Gabriel Jose de la Concordia Garcia Marquez. Marquez was raised by his maternal grandparents in a home loaded up with a lot of aunts and gossips about apparitions. The most significant relatives of Garcia Marquez were his maternal grandparents. Colonel Nicolas Ricardo Marquez Meija, a liberal veteran of the Thousand Days’ war, was his grandfather. The Colonel was an intriguing man, and he was a brilliant story teller to little Marquez. He is the person who revealed the insider facts of words to little Gabriel. Marquez was gifted by his Grandfather with a dictionary, which made him familiar with words – an author's first link with the wide world of letters. The character of the Colonel in the novella No One Writes to the Colonel is modeled on his grandfather. Hope is a positive perspective that depends on a desire for good results as for occasions and conditions in a person's life or the world as a whole. As a verb hope means: "expect with certainty" and "to value a longing with expectation." The Psychologist Charles R. Snyder connected hope with the presence of an objective, joined with a decided arrangement for achieving that objective. Alfred Adler had also contended for the centrality of focus on aim for in human psychology, as did the philosophical anthropologists like Ernst Bloch. Snyder likewise focused on the relation between hope and determination, just as the requirement for sensible view of objectives, contending that the contrast among hope and wishful thinking was that the previous included practical methods to reach a better future. This paper attempts to explore the themes of hope and despair in the novella No One Writes to the Colonel and the novel The General in his Labyrinth from a psychological perspective. According to Snyder (2007), hope is defined as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways. The adult and child hope scales that are derived from hope theory are described. Hope theory is compared to theories of learned optimism, optimism, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. Higher hope consistently is related to better outcomes in academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment, and psychotherapy.