One Hundred Years of Solitude, Part I

The book isn't written as an accurate description of a family history, it is much too vivid for that, even feeling fictitious at times. Yet, Marquez seems to have purosely done so, he seems to have written a book about the Buendia family that includes such startling even mythical situations that the reader simply accepts as true. For example, Aureliano's prophetic warnings and premonitions since the time he predicted the soup's fall- "just as soon as the child made his announcement, it began an unmistakeable movement toward the edge, as if impelled by some inner dynamism, and it fell and broke on the floor," (15). To further attest to the mystical aura of the book, Melquiades' claims of self-reincarnation, Jose Arcadio Buendia's hallucinations of Prudencio Aguilar, and a plague of insomnia that causes loss of memory. As Taylor noted, Marquez focuses on the people themselves (the characters) rather than their accurate chronological history. This supports the idea that Marquez created almost a mystical world yet one that isn't questioned for being so.

The characters themselves are quite complex and, as Mary noted, were all touched in some respect by isolation and desolation. In particular, I'd like to discuss Amaranta, who clearly suffers from a variety of nueroses. Unlike many of the other characters in the story, her own isolation and solitude appears to be self-induced, in that she refused two prospective husbands (both of whom she was in love with)- resulting in one's death. And unlike many of her family members, Amaranta is physically isolated rather than simply in an emotional capacity.

To conclude, describing to Moscote of his overbearing presence in Mocondo, Jose Arcadio Buendia "gave a detailed account of how they had founded the village, of how they had distributed the land, opened the roads, and introduced the improvements that necessity required without having bothered the government and without anyone having bothered them," (56). Buendia stresses the fact that the town itself proliferated without any interaction- in solitude. As Paul mentioned, it seemed to be the introduction of the gypsies into this edenic society that distrupted the natural order, and sullied the traditional morality. It is interesting then to note that in certain cases solitude is emphasized as being a positive rather than a negative.

-Tzivia

August 11, 2008 3:26 PM