One Hundred Years of Solitude
...son and the first human born in the town, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, is facing a firing squad and recalling the event during the much more calm “innocent” days when his father took him to discover ice. (Instantly, the reader is thrown in to a time lapse into the present and past.) This standard flashback technique guides the reader into a time realm that Marquez uses to describe the development and destruction of Macondo, concurrently. At moments, the process of time is ambiguous. The days follow linear time, but not chronologically. Jose Arcadio Buendia, as a character, is the patriarch of the Buendia family. He is structurally an unsound mythical thinker who wants to believe in the wildest of inventions and other foolish theories. He and Ursula, his wife and cousin, are the founders of the land in which they live. The land is described as being secluded from all sides. The people of Macondo are isolated from the outside world of progress with the exception of Melquiades, yet to be described, and his crowd gypsies that come each May to bring new gadgets. These trinkets are unnecessary for the non-Macodians; however, Jose Arcadio Buendia is willing to invest his life savings to obtain his new “treasures.” Against Ursula’s better judgment, she gives her inheritance to her husband to support his fixation. Ursula, on the other hand, is described as a quaint woman who lets fate take its place in the town. She knows from the beginning, the outcome of events. It is not a premonition as it is an intuition of her character. Throughout the book, she remains a strong backbone of the Buendias. Among other characters, Marquez uses Ursula to foretell future events. This sustains the concept of time that he intends. In the development of her character, she circumvents her husband’s sexual advancements in fear that she and her incestual relationship with her husband will produce pig-tailed offspring. Her attempts prove futile as the Buendias conceive three children. Their first child, Jose Arcadio II, does not genetically generate a pigtail. He does; however, overly mature his male organ at puberty, and Ursula believes his abnormal size is a curse of she and her husband’s incest. Jose Arcadio II is described as an egoistical masculine man who finds his way in the bed of the town’s fortuneteller, Pilar Ternera. They have a child by the name of Jose Arcadio III. He abandons the new family by escaping Macondo with a lady gypsy, and he does not return in the book for some time. At his return, he falls in love with his adopted sister, Rebecca. Against Ursula’s intuition, they marry. After avoiding death so many times, Jose mysteriously dies at home while Rebecca showers. Soon after, his father dies as well. The only other male child of Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula is the one previously mentioned, Colonel Aureliano Buendia. He governs the themes of the novel. The themes of illegitimacy, fantasy, magic, and solitude are all part of his character. Like his brother, he fathers a child with Pilar Ternera. He also fornicates with seventeen other women resulting in seventeen bastard sons. He sets the theme of fantasy by obtaining premonitions of the future. This highlights the concept of fantasy the book has in store. The author utilizes Colonel to represent the theme of solitude, which is continuous from the moment Colonel was born through six generations of Buendia’s males. In fact, the Buendia males endure many hardships, defending their rights in the Macondo civil war, and find themselves in a state of solitude, whether it is prison, in front of the firing squad, or death. This is something that cannot be escaped. It is the family’s fate, which is later described in the manuscript that Melquiades gives Jose Arcadio Buendia. Contrary to the males, the Buendia women subdue their overconfident egos and immerse their feelings of vulnerability into an illumination of stability for the men. As critic, Ian Johnston describes, “What seems to be missing is any consistent ability to find a middle ground between the impossible delusions of weak and unstable men and the down-to-earth home-bound order and stability of the women.” This topic has evolved the two male children to their sisters, Amaranta and Rebecca. Rebeca is a fantastic example of Marquez’s extraordinary exaggerations. As she arrived in Macondo, she brings the bones of her biological parents in a bag and the insomnia plague that infects Macondo, from which the town never recovers. This plague is set to serve as a metaphor for the loss of the town’s innocence. Amaranta and Rebeca are two characters that exemplify magic realism in the “polar opposite” spectrum. Amaranta is much like her natural mother. She is strong and modest, and gives a sense of insecurity; whereas, Rebecca, who is an adopted daughter, is ostentatious and carefree. As adolescents, they are extremely competitive against one another, namely over their common love interest, Pietro Crespi. Their competitiveness ceases when their brother Jose Arcadio II returned, and he and Rebecca marries. As the story goes on, Jose Aracdio Buendia’s trusted trader Melquiades dies, but this is not the end of the sight of him. He dies several times, in fact. His ghost resides in the Buendia’s home. The family secludes a room as his own workspace. Melquiades entrusts Jose Aracdio Buendia with his manuscript that was written by him in a “Sanscript” code. The contents were to be determined. Over the many generations of the family, bit-by-bit the men reveal its contents as the fate of the Buendia family. The narrator is now...