A Hundred Years of Solitude Character Tree, Family Tree
Literary Theory and Criticism
Analysis of Márquez's Ane Hundred Years of Confinement
Gabriel Garcıa Marquez's (1927-2014)Ane Hundred Years of Solitude was first published on May thirty, 1967, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The cover of the starting time edition, which was never repeated, depicted the silhouette of a galleon floating among trees against a blue background, which contrasts with three geometric yellowish flowers on the lower part of the cover in the foreground (Cobo Borda 101). The novel was an immediate best-seller in Spanish: "not since Madame Bovary [past the French author Gustave Flaubert] has a volume been received with the simultaneous popular success and disquisitional acclaim that greeted Ane Hundred Years of Solitude" (Janes 1991, thirteen). In three and a half years, the volume sold about a one-half million copies. As a consequence, previous books by Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez were reprinted in big numbers in the Spanish-speaking earth (Vargas Llosa 78). When translations of One Hundred Years of Solitude were published, the novel achieved additional acclaim and honors: in 1969, in Italy, the volume won the Premio Chianchiano (Chianchiano Award); the same year, in France, it won the Prix du meilleur livre e ́tranger (Honour for all-time Foreign Book); in 1970, in the Usa, it was selected every bit ane of the best twelve books of the twelvemonth by Time mag. Although it is difficult to read because of its literary technique, its appeal is that of a classic, which bridges the worlds of academia and popular culture. According to Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a volume as "profound as the cosmos and capable of endless interpretations" (quoted in Cobo Borda 106).
Gabriel García Márquez/Pinterest
As many critics have noted, I Hundred Years of Confinement was written in 18 months, following a period in which García Márquez suffered from a writer's block. However, Ane Hundred Years of Confinement was indeed in gestation since the late 1940s, when García Márquez was in his early twenties. One Hundred Years of Solitude had been actualization as if in segments, with the invention of mythical Macondo and Colonel Aureliano Buendıa; the utilize of a cyclical course of fourth dimension; and the repetitiveness of events, images of magic realism, and elements of the underworld and the absurd; merely of a sudden, like pieces of a puzzle, everything was brought together and seemed to fit perfectly. Although Leaf Tempest chronologically first introduces the saga of Macondo, One Hundred Years of Solitude encompasses the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the genesis and the apocalypse, of Macondo and its people. The landscape of mythical Macondo and several of the main characters of Foliage Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1961), Large Mama's Funeral (1962), and In Evil Hour (1962) denote the birth of this masterpiece.
PLOT Development
Different plot developments may become apparent depending on where the reader focuses his or her attention. The reader may focus on the discovery and Spanish colonization of the Americas; on the wars and fights betwixt the Liberal and Conservative Parties; on American neo-colonialism; on the furnishings of a dictatorship; on honey, the lack of love, eroticism, or incest; or on the solitude and isolation of a town and its people. Any plot the reader chooses has such a plethora of data that he or she would be hard-pressed to organize and recall everything that is taking place.
The lineage and events of the Buendıa family, notwithstanding, can be seen as the primary story in the narrative, regardless of interpretation. However, this yet does non make it an easy story to follow. The difficulty in understanding the story can be attributed to the enormous amount of information given in each chapter, and indeed on each page. Literary critic Harold Flower wrote that his first impression, on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, was that of an artful battle fatigue, since every page is so full of life that it is beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb (Flower i). Mexican author and literary critic Carlos Fuentes, earlier Bloom, affirmed that 1 Hundred Years of Solitude should be read at to the lowest degree twice to begin to understand it. Nigh readers find themselves overwhelmed by the number of events and characters involved and become unable to maintain the plot's thread. This oft leads readers to put the book downwards unfinished. However, diligent readers will be left with the empowering feeling of having read about a universe filled with strong women and men who cartel to dream. Ane Hundred Years of Solitude is present seen as a classic of contemporary literature, a tour de strength of dandy virtuosity and strength.
One Hundred Years of Confinement begins in medias res (in the middle of events) and covers a broad focus. The all-seeing narrative vocalization introduces great suspense at the very opening of the novel when the reader is faced with a vehement image: i of the main characters, Colonel Aureliano Buendıa, is about to be killed by a firing squad. The all-seeing narrative vocalism knows everything that happens to the characters and understands why they behave as they do. The chapter ends and the execution fails to take place. Although the reader is given plenty information to imagine the founding of Macondo and the major roles of Ursula and the gypsy Melquıades, the opening chapter does not provide enough information to find out why Colonel Aureliano Buendıa is to be killed. In fact, the colonel never is killed. As readers learn several chapters later, Jose Arcadio saves his younger brother, the colonel, from the firing team. Within the opening chapter the reader goes back in fourth dimension and witnesses the "retention" that opens the novel. Information technology concerns the time when the founding father, Jose Arcadio Buendıa, paid for a chance to see, along with his two sons, a block of ice. The contemporary reader may fail to come across a cake of ice every bit a great invention, but for a rural Colombian man at the terminate of the nineteenth century, it was an invention beyond measure. Jose Arcadio Buendia is non naive, he is simply unaware of what is happening outside Macondo. This is a man who does not know virtually the magnet and sees dentures every bit a form of magic.
Succeeding chapters introduce Jose ́ Arcadio and give more than background on his blood brother, Aureliano, who grows upwards to become a colonel. Aureliano marries Remedios Moscote, with whom he has no children; however, he does engender seventeen sons, all named Aureliano, each with different mothers. Amaranta, the only daughter of Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendıa, never marries, preferring to stay habitation and help around the business firm. Amaranta'southward name reappears at the terminate of the novel, in that of Amaranta Ursula. Amaranta Ursula gives nascence to a son out of wedlock. It is this son, named Aureliano Babilonia, who will be the last of the dynasty of Buendıas. He will fulfill the prophecy that one of the Buendıas would exist built-in with a pig's tail as a result of incest.
The repetition of names causes confusion to the reader, although the author is simply reflecting the Spanish tradition of passing the father's name on to his firstborn, a tradition too found in Europe and the Us. Jose Arcadio, by contrast, is recognized by his monumental size and is referred to by the writer as Jose ́ Arcadio, while his begetter is referred to as Jose Arcadio Buendıa. Jose Arcadio, before leaving Macondo to join a grouping of gypsies, leaves Pilar Ternera pregnant with his son. When the baby is built-in, he is also named Arcadio, honoring both the father and the grandfather. This cluttered and circular way of repeating the names Arcadio and Aureliano is discussed in depth later on in this chapter under the department on character development.
Pilar Ternera is the daughter of i of the founding families, but her social status is below the Buend ́ıas. She lives a life of no restrictions, unattached and carefree. She initiates young Aureliano (the legendary colonel) into sexual matters and ends upwardly having a son by him named Aureliano Jose. These two grandchildren of the Buendıas, born to Pilar Ternera, confirm the family's downfall initiated past the incestuous marriage of their grandparents, founders of Macondo. Both grandchildren are the first Buendıa bastards in a town where illegitimacy is far from the exception. Although Colonel Aureliano Buendıa fathers seventeen sons, plus Aureliano Jose, these eighteen grandchildren's lives contribute minimally to the way in which the plot of One Hundred Years of Solitude unfolds.
For over half of 1 Hundred Years of Confinement, the life of Colonel Aureliano Buendıa functions as the leading thread to the plot. Some readers may cull him as the central protagonist of the novel, although he dies—of old age, defeated, without any honors, ignored past the crowds and in complete confinement—while the novel continues. His ain family unit is not aware that he is dead until the next solar day at xi in the morning. His whole life seems similar one big failure. He loses all the wars he fights, and none of his 18 sons continues his bloodline. It is through Arcadio, the Buend ́ıas' grandson, that the lineage and the plot continue. With his lover, Santa Sof ́ıa de la Piedad, Arcadio fathers three children: Remedios the Beauty, Aureliano Segundo, and Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo. These great-grandchildren of the original Buend ́ıas keep the accent on the circular aspect of the plot. Remedios the Beauty is named later Remedios Moscote, the child-wife of Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa. Remedios the Beauty is free of small-boondocks conventionalisms. Unaware of her eroticism and her dazzler, she prefers the solitude of the house, where she goes around nude. However, her beauty is tinged with tragedy, which leads those who become attracted to her to their death.
Similar their grandpa (Jose ́ Arcadio) and their grand-uncle (Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa) before them, Aureliano Segundo and Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo likewise share the same woman (Petra Cotes), but no children are born of her. Nonetheless, Aureliano Segundo marries Fernanda del Carpio and does accept three children with her to acquit forward the Buend ́ıa name. Fernanda del Carpio brings to the Buend ́ıas the refinement they lack but also the prejudices they had lacked likewise. Although Ursula, the founding mother, accepts the first two bastards (Arcadio and Aureliano Jose ́) as members of the family, Fernanda del Carpio, who was educated "to be a queen" (222), feels compelled by social and moral prejudices to hide the pregnancy of her daughter, Meme. When the child of the love between Meme and Mauricio Babilonia is built-in, Fernanda del Carpio hides the identity of her grandson. This kid, also named Aureliano (Aureliano Babilonia), best describes the confinement and solitude of the Buend ́ıa descendents. By mode of his solitude and solitude, he manages to translate the parchments written by Melqúıades in Sanskrit. As Aureliano begins to decipher the parchments, he (the fictional reader) and we (the existent readers—those with the book in their hands) somehow come to understand why the plot development is so difficult to follow. He decodes: "Melqu ́ıades had non put events in the order of human being'due south conventional time, but had full-bodied a century of daily episodes in such a manner that they coexisted in one instant" (446). As Aureliano Babilonia reads the parchments, he begins to read of his own life. He learns that the object of his love is his aunt, Amaranta Ursula, and that the baby male child they have was supposed to be born with a sus scrofa's tail and eaten past ants. Aureliano Babilonia is thus deciphering the instant he is living.
The labyrinthine plot, viewed through the Buend ́ıas' lineage, comes to an end every bit the novel ends. Every bit Aureliano Babilonia deciphers the parchments, he and the reader both come to understand that the end is apocalyptical. He knows he will never go out the room of what is left of the Buend ́ıas' firm. He knows his expiry is imminent. He reads that the town of Macondo will be wiped out by the twirling wind and erased from the map "when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments" (448). However, Aureliano Babilonia continues to decipher the parchments. Why would anybody continue to read in the knowledge that it would speed up his own death? This is left up to the reader to make up one's mind. At that place are those who say that Aureliano Babilonia continues to read and others who believe that he stops as if in a freeze-frame.
The end of One Hundred Years of Confinement is indeed puzzling. Aureliano, the concluding of the Buend ́ıa dynasty, is decoding Melqu ́ıades' parchments. He comes to sympathise that he will not be able to get out the room in the house where he is reading considering Macondo will be erased from the surface of the earth. This is written in Melqu ́ıades' parchments. Would he and so stop reading and thus cease the destruction of Macondo—and his own destruction? Literary critic Emir Rodr ́ıguez-Monegal thinks that is exactly what Aureliano does. "He, Aureliano, is petrified forever in the final line in the act of reading" (Rodr ́ıguez-Monegal 152).
GENRE AND NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
One Hundred Years of Solitude can be considered the magic realist novel par excellence, but only at the expense of simplifying information technology. In an effort to be objective, some literary critics began referring to novels such equally Ane Hundred Years of Solitude as "Novela Total." The term probably needs no translation—and a translation would probably fail to depict anything. In the tardily 1960s most critics in Spanish were satisfied with the term Novela Full and Anglo critics with the term New Latin American Novel.
Although stating that the New Latin American Novel could not yet be baptized under a given name, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes was ready to group the writings of Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez, Vargas Llosa, Jose ́ Donoso, and Manuel Puig with writers such equally William Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry, Herman Brock, and William Golding. The terminal four, wrote Fuentes, went back to the poetic roots of literature. Through the utilize of language and the self-conscious structuring of the novel, rather than through psychology and intrigue, these writers created a class of reality that attempts to exist totalizing inasmuch every bit it invents a second reality, which is parallel to the 1 outside the text. Through this totalizing 2d reality within the text, the reader of I Hundred Years of Solitude may or may not recognize the hidden part of the truth that the novel unfolds, only it exists regardless.
The broad telescopic of Carlos Fuentes'south assay encompasses American and European influences or similarities in the fashion One Hundred Years of Solitude deals with language, time, and space in gild to unfold the story of the text.
I Hundred Years of Solitude opens in medias res, just dissimilar Leaf Storm, where the beginning is also the stop, in One Hundred Years of Confinement this is not the case. Discretely divided into twenty chapters (which are not numbered), the time span of the novel is roughly between 1820 and 1927 (hence the championship, One Hundred Years of Solitude). However, there are occasional references back to the sixteenth century, as if to suggest the beginning of the colonization of Spanish America. (One example is the episode where Jose ́ Arcadio Buend ́ıa finds a galleon.) While the geographic space seems to be limited to the Buend ́ıas' home and the town of Macondo, if the reader thinks of it as an apologue (a story with a double or multiple meaning: a main meaning, that of the story itself, plus other meanings), Ane Hundred Years of Solitude can be seen as taking identify wherever the reader imagines.
Unlike Leaf Storm or the brusque stories "Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo" and "Tuesday Siesta", where Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez strives to make apply of experimental modern techniques such as stream of consciousness or interior monologue, and the flashback, One Hundred Years of Solitude employs what can be referred to as traditional writing: the authorization of make-believe over realism (the representation of life and nature without idealization) and the authority of an omniscient narrative.
Most critics run into 1 Hundred Years of Confinement as a novel that tin be read in a myriad of ways, allowing multiple interpretations including the mythological and historical. Three decades after its publication, the interpretations are endless. Without being exhaustive, the narrative structure of One Hundred Years of Confinement contains the following examples of literary constructs: popular civilisation through scenes of the daily life of a Hispanic rural town, with sacred rituals and secular celebrations; repetitiveness; hyperbole; a chaotic time frame due to a round narration; religious elements; eroticism; social and political conflict; and myth.
The narrative voice is that of an all-seeing narrator. Through this voice the reader comes to know the life of 6 generations of the Buend ́ıa family, whose members are founders of Macondo, and both witnesses and participants in the ascent, fall, and total destruction of the community through its civil wars, foreign exploitation, plagues, incestuous and non-incestuous love, isolation, death, and confinement.
The omniscient narrator can be seen both inside or outside the text and sometimes even as a grapheme witness, knowing everything that happens to the characters but remaining apart from them. The narrator is outside the text when telling the readers, for example, that Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa is most to be killed past a firing squad at the get-go of the novel. Shortly thereafter, the omniscient narrator appears as witness when we read the descriptions of the genesis of Macondo and the yearly visits of a family of gypsies lead by Melqu ́ıades. Much afterward in the novel, the all-seeing narrator once more appears equally witness when noting that the shooting of Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa past the firing team never took identify. The omniscient narration seems to be inhabited by the pervasive presence of the irrational and the supernatural. Melquıades, leader of the gypsies and fictional author of the Buend ́ıas' story, survives leprosy, beriberi, and the bubonic plague; he somewhen dies but and then is resurrected. Jose ́ Arcadio Buend ́ıa, the founding father, is said to take had an imagination bigger than miracles and magic put together. From the start of the novel, the villagers of Macondo are convinced, as is his wife, Ursula, that Jose ́ Arcadio Buend ́ıa "had lost his reason" (5).
The story told in Ane Hundred Years of Solitude is believable, but the facts that unfold are exaggerated, blown out of proportion, and even irrational, as if to mock the act of storytelling by mocking what is told, the way information technology is told, and why information technology is told. The exaggeration becomes comical, and equally a result, the reader ceases to see it as irrational and perceives it instead as something possible. The excesses of gluttony, cruelty, virility, sexual authority, violence, decease, longevity, and confinement are all treated in an obviously illogical fashion. The fact that the narrative voice recounts such irrational events in a most natural way makes the reader overlook the irrational and therefore concord with what he or she reads, while still accepting its irrationality at some level. Remedios the Dazzler, for example, rises to heaven equally effortlessly every bit if she were simply taking the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. The narrative construction looks at the irrational every bit daily routine, as matter-of-fact. This, in short, is one way of explaining the rather open-concluded concept of magic realism.
Another visible construct of the narrative structure is the concept of two forces in opposition: examples include love and death, the fight between liberals and conservatives, and the juxtaposition of the brothers Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. Jose Arcadio is the first to be born to the Buend ́ıa family unit and Aureliano is the legendary Colonel Aureliano Buendıa. They tin can be seen equally the antithesis of each other.
Grapheme Evolution
Grapheme evolution in Ane Hundred Years of Solitude is as complex as the novel itself. This complexity can be observed in the big number of characters inhabiting the novel and the tradition of passing on the start proper noun of the father to his firstborn. The repetition of names creates chaos and confuses the reader. The worlds of Aurelianos and Arcadios (for males), of Ursulas and Amarantas (for females) seem to weave a kind of tapestry where the threads are not as important as the whole flick. Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez does with graphic symbol evolution what artist Maurits Cornelis (M. C.) Escher did with optical illusions, creating repeated patterns, impossible constructions, and space space. The reader is not e'er certain of who is being referred to, for these names may bear either a symbolic or an allegoric meaning, depending on the reader's interpretation.
Trying to describe each character individually would be too time-consuming and complex to be useful. However, the principal characters can exist grouped by the characteristics they share. Female characters, for instance, are developed as emotional beings who experience both love and hate. The female characters are drawn between the beloved and passion they experience for their men and the sorry destiny that surrounds each couple. All female person characters in the Buend ́ıa family, with the exception of Ursula and Amaranta Ursula, lead their suitors to either death or defeat. Jose ́ Arcadio, Rebeca'southward husband, is mysteriously killed in his own firm; the Italian-born Pietro Crespi commits suicide after existence rejected by Amaranta; all the suitors of Remedios the Dazzler tragically die in an endeavour to admire her beauty; and Mauricio Babilonia is shot in the back while secretly visiting Meme and left unable to walk.
Ursula (the matriarch), Amaranta (Ursula's daughter, sis of Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa), and Amaranta Ursula (the concluding female person of the Buend ́ıa's dynasty) are amidst the female person characters deserving special attention. Ursula is kickoff cousin and wife of Jose ́ Arcadio Buend ́ıa, the patriarch of Macondo. She represents perseverance in life, and the cyclical time of the novel revolves around her. She witnesses the founding of Macondo, gives birth to the start Jose ́ Arcadio (the legendary Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa) and the never-married Amaranta, she sees her two sons marry, and she lives to run into half dozen generations of Buend ́ıas die, making the one hundred years of the novel her ain experience. Ursula is the centerpiece of the Buend ́ıa family. She is, on the one hand, the submissive wife who by and large follows her hubby's decisions and wishes, but on the other hand, she manages to leave Macondo for five months in search of her firstborn, Jose ́ Arcadio. She fails to discover him, only when she returns to Macondo she seems to be rejuvenated. She comes back bringing a different lifestyle, gear up to introduce progress to Macondo. Ursula is conscious of her matriarchal responsibility and exercises information technology at all levels. She behaves as the patient and faithful wife to her aged and mad husband, who must exist tied to a tree to restrain him. She is a loving mother who defies an army to visit her son in jail. She is also the one who, without remorse, throws Pilar Ternera out of the firm for her extravagant sexual beliefs. She is the loving grandmother who takes care of the illegitimate grandchildren of her two sons. She is cocky-assured and decisive when others are not, and she always seems to have the last word without sounding like a tyrant. Ursula reminds readers of the power of Large Mama, the central graphic symbol in "Big Mama's Funeral".
Compared with the rest of the female characters in Ane Hundred Years of Confinement, Ursula stands out considering of her strength, both physical and emotional. Fearless in her convictions, she manages to stop a firing squad that, nether the decadent and absurd decision of her son Jose ́ Arcadio, was gear up to execute an innocent man. Compared to the egotism of her girl, Amaranta, she is a generous mother who tirelessly feeds, not just her own large family unit, merely too all those who happen to stop past her house for whatever reason. Compared to Remedios the Beauty, whose scent turns men insane, Ursula is poised and sensible. Compared to Pilar Ternera, whose fertility and sexual practice drive are such that she mothers a child with both of Ursula's two sons, Ursula is serene and unyieldingly fights to go along her family together. Gabriel Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez himself described Ursula equally the ideal woman (Joset 89).
Amaranta, daughter of the founders of Macondo, is a particularly interesting character due to the complexity of her personality. As is mutual practice with Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez'due south characters, her proper noun, Amaranta, foreshadows her personality. Phonetically (relating to sound), Amaranta in Spanish closely resembles the sound of amargura (bitterness). It may besides refer, equally Jacques Joset points out in a footnote to One Hundred Years of Solitude in Castilian (Joset 121), to a plant from India, amaranto (amaranth). The constitute, in Indian antiquity, was a symbol for immortality, and as such, the Indians consecrated it to the expressionless.
Amaranta is tall and slim, with an air of distinction. She is portrayed as a jealous woman. She hates Rebeca (who has grown upwardly in the Buend ́ıa household equally a member of the family) considering they both accept fallen in love with the same man, Pietro Crespi. Feeling humiliated past Crespi'southward indifference, Amaranta promises him she volition never let him marry Rebeca. Ironically, Rebeca marries Amaranta's brother (her own half-brother), Jose ́ Arcadio, and Pietro Crespi commits suicide. Amaranta's extreme temperament forces her into self-imposed isolation. She dies lonely and a virgin.
Amaranta fully shares the solitude of the Buend ́ıa family. She grows onetime rejecting Colonel Gerineldo Ma ́rquez, who has proposed marriage to her. Like the Buend ́ıas, Amaranta also seems to accept a special relationship with death. She works on weaving her ain shroud for four years, believing correctly that she will die at the moment when she completes information technology. She as well orders the measurements for her ain casket and announces that she volition die on February 4. In a most carnivalesque way, she offers herself equally a messenger for anyone who wishes to send news to the expressionless. On the mean solar day of her death, she bathes, refuses to take confession from Father Antonio Isabel, and forces her mother to give public testimony that she died a virgin.
Another important female person graphic symbol in Ane Hundred Years of Confinement is Amaranta Ursula. As her name indicates, her dandy-grandmother, Ursula Iguaran, and her slap-up-grandaunt, Amaranta Buend ́ıa, influence her character. Indeed, Amaranta Ursula is a synthesis of all the female characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Amaranta Ursula is identical to her great-grandmother, the founding matriarch of Macondo. She is dynamic, dogged, vigorous, and has no prejudices. Besides like her keen-grandmother, she is happy and centered. The beauty of Remedios the Beauty was also passed on to her. Like Meme, her own sis, Amaranta Ursula uses good judgment and shows dandy interest in her studies. Amaranta Ursula is the daughter of Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda del Carpio. Similar her mother, Amaranta Ursula receives a strong religious training in Brussels, Belgium. She returns from Belgium married to Gasto ́n, an older, Flemish homo. Foreshadowing even so some other character, Fermina Daza in Love in the Time of Cholera, she dresses fashionably, wears expensive jewelry, and shows herself to exist a gratis spirit, liberated of prejudices.
Although Amaranta Ursula dreams of returning to Macondo with a faithful husband, she likewise wants to modify the age-old traditions of the Buend ́ıas. For example, she wants to have two sons named Rodrigo and Gonzalo, not Aureliano and Jose ́ Arcadio. (In real life, Mercedes Barcha, wife of Gabriel Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez, got Amaranta Ursula'southward wish—she has two sons, named Rodrigo and Gonzalo.) Amaranta Ursula's European grooming, however, does not modify her. Like her not bad-grandfather, Jose ́ Arcadio Buend ́ıa (the founding patriarch of Macondo), she does things ane day only to disengage them the next. Similar many of her ancestors, she too loves with abandon. When her hubby, Gasto ́n, leaves her, she falls in dearest with her own nephew, Aureliano Babilonia, the son of her sister, Meme. Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Ursula are the only couple in Ane Hundred Years of Solitude to observe true beloved. This beloved, all the same, brings destruction on them, as Amaranta Ursula dies giving nascency to the last of the Buend ́ıas, the one with a pig's tail as feared by the matriarch Ursula Iguara ́n in the beginning of Ane Hundred Years of Solitude.
The male person characters can besides be described by common, salient traits. The male names are repeated unceasingly through the six generations of Buend ́ıas. The names are not picked at random; they relate to the function that each character plays in the plot. The omniscient narrator suggests the meaning of the names by attributing marked characteristics to those begetting a given name. The Arcadios, for example, are large in stature, whereas the Aurelianos are smaller. The Arcadios are addicted of loudness, whereas the Aurelianos are introspective. The Arcadios are corpulent, awe-inspiring in size; the Aurelianos are bony, sparse, and par- simonious. The Arcadios are active, strong-willed, independent, and dictatorial, fifty-fifty to the point of being tyrants. The Aurelianos are solitary, shy, and interested in reading. (One of them deciphers Melquiades' parchments.) The only instance when this name classification becomes dislocated is with Aureliano Segundo and his twin brother, Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo, who are so much alike that even they would phone call each other by the wrong name. Even so, like a trick of magic realism, the games they play end upward disruptive them and they are changed for life. The names they utilise in the game brainstorm to determine their physical characteristics, changing even their biological heritage. Thus, Aureliano Segundo, like all the Arcadios in the family tree, grows to be tall and potent, and Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo, who otherwise would have been tall and strong, is brusque and bony. Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo shows interest in public affairs and tries to decipher Melqu ́ıades' parchments, whereas Aureliano Segundo ends up leading a frivolous life. Withal, the twins die on the aforementioned twenty-four hours.
The male characters, more than the female characters, embody the myth of confinement, which permeates the novel. In his solitude, Jose ́ Arcadio Buend ́ıa (the founder) initiates a long meditation about the passage of time. His son, Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa, the father of seventeen Aurelianos with seventeen different women and who "survived 14 attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing team" (113), dies of quondam historic period, in miserable confinement, adjacent to the same tree where his father had died years before him.
THEMATIC Bug
One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with an allusion to war (Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa is almost to exist shot past a firing team), but the theme of war is not a primary event. The solitude shared by every member of the Buend ́ıa family, combined with incest, comprises the central themes of Ane Hundred Years of Solitude.
The solitude endured past the Buend ́ıas is a kind of curse, which they brought on themselves for their disability to fall in love, their strongly held superstitious beliefs, and the foundation of the family from an incestuous marriage. When Jose ́ Arcadio Buend ́ıa marries Ursula Iguara ́n, they both know they are first cousins. Although the husband thinks nothing of it, the wife is filled with irrational fears and the fatal superstition that those who ally their own family unit may requite birth to a plain-featured child with a pig'south tail. She dies of old age without confirming her fright, but it is realized at the terminate of the novel, when Amaranta Ursula, not knowing she is related to him, falls in love with her nephew, Aureliano Babilonia. They requite birth to the concluding of the Buend ́ıas, who is born with a pig's tail.
The solitude shared by the Buend ́ıas tin exist hands observed by the isolation of the boondocks, which appears to accept been forgotten by civilisation and the exterior globe. The paths the chief characters follow in life also emphasize confinement. Ursula talks to the dead, a form of solitude as nobody but herself tin can hear them; she besides suffers from blindness, thus indelible a life in the dark. Her hubby dies in solitude tied to a tree, left to the elements, and ignored as if he were indeed a role of the tree and non her husband, founder of Macondo, father, grandpa, and admired patriarch. Their three children all alive and die in solitude, as well. Amaranta, their just daughter, never marries past choice. She rejects the marriage proposals of Pietro Crespi and Gerineldo Ma ́rquez and dies a virgin. The two sons besides cull a life of solitude. Jose ́ Arcadio, the firstborn, leaves Macondo to travel around the globe every bit a gypsy. When he returns, although he is not in beloved, he marries Rebeca, but Rebeca, who brings to Macondo equally a kid the insomnia plague, a class of solitude that leads to the loss of memory and a state of idiocy that has no past (48), is an adopted girl to the Buend ́ıas. The illusion of incest is obvious to those exterior the Buend ́ıa family. Pietro Crespi, for one, cannot understand how siblings can get married, for he is in love with Rebeca, but she rejects him to marry her own one-half-brother. The farthermost solitude of Pietro Crespi is such that, after being rejected by both Rebeca and Amaranta, he finds refuge in suicide.
Aureliano Buend ́ıa, the second son but the commencement to be born in Macondo, marries the child Remedios Moscote. Like his brother, he fathers no legitimate children. His determination to marry Remedios Moscote is arbitrary, not one arrived at out of love. Remedios, who is more interested in playing with dolls, does not feel love for him either. She still wets her bed at the time of the wedding. A silent and solitary man by nature, Aureliano Buend ́ıa lives and dies in solitude. Ursula, his mother, says he is incapable of loving. The two brothers, Jose ́ Arcadio and Aureliano, each have a son with Pilar Ternera but neither one of the babies is born out of love. Pilar Ternera has sexual activity with them for sheer pleasance. In the same vein, the marriage of Fernanda del Carpio and Aureliano Segundo is 1 of convenience, as are the relationships of Petra Cotes, who is shared as a lover by Aureliano Segundo and Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo.
The solitude of the characters tin be brought on past a lack of honey between a couple, whether in marriage or otherwise, but solitude tin also arise merely as office of the human being condition. Indeed, in guild to understand life, a person has to retrieve of birth and death as, past their very nature, forms of solitude. However, to experience solitude, the characters in the novel—and the readers exterior of it—accept to be aware of the other: other people, other societies, and other languages. This confirms, for example, the fact that in the novel, readers witness the discovery of theories that elsewhere take already been discovered and the anaesthesia of the townspeople when they first see an astrolabe, a map, a magnet, a magnifying glass, ice, and dentures. Such solitude, in fact, is ane of the themes that can easily distinguish the literary works of Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez.
Returning to the theme of war, which is non the principal issue in One Hundred Years of Confinement, it is withal intimately related to the political turmoil depicted in the novel. The wars between liberals and conservatives lasted nearly 20 years. During this time, the liberals fought thirty-2 wars against the government (the Bourgeois Party) and lost them all. Co-ordinate to the narrative voice, the conservatives come to Macondo to disrupt the harmony and peace in which the town and its inhabitants lived. The discontent starts with the arrival of Don Apolinar Moscote. He comes as a representative of the government to do the law, simply to Jose ́ Arcadio Buend ́ıa, founder of the town, he only brings chaos. Soon after the inflow of Apolinar Moscote and his family, the ordered universe of Macondo is threatened by confusion, disorder, corruption, and finally war. The wars in the novel finish, only the solitude of the Buend ́ıas does not.
SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
One Hundred Years of Solitude portrays a period of time that stretches from the early on 1800s to the early 1900s. These years encompass Colombian ceremonious wars, neocolonialism, political violence, corruption, sexuality, death, and confinement, in the midst of other ascendant themes. These concerns, however, are treated through myth and fantasy with a magic-realist format that leaves many readers unaware of the historical, political, and ideological content of the novel'due south background.
Most critics take pointed out that the social and political turmoil of 1 Hundred Years of Confinement seems to transcribe the Colombian violence of countless civil wars and particularly the violence of the late 1940s, an epoch noted for its trigger-happy tendencies. The foundation of the fictional town of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Confinement, equally literary critic Joaqu ́ın Marco pointed out, is, in fact, a trigger-happy act that finds its roots in the Spanish tradition of "honor," with clear sexual connotations of "machismo" (Marco 48). Laurels and machismo as well appear in Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), where both are primal themes. The violence of One Hundred Years of Solitude focuses on the historical fight between a pair of opposing political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, which had the greatest rivalry Colombia had always known. Although all the Buend ́ıa family unit figures prominently in the narrative, it is through Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa that the reader gets to read of fictionalized events in the wars between the two political parties. Information technology is interesting to note that Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa, a liberal, as governor of Macondo, grows to be as cruel, despotic, and calumniating equally the conservatives he fights in the novel. In fact, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in its depiction of the Buend ́ıa family unit, favors the liberals, still the omniscient narrator is quick to betoken out their flaws. The Buend ́ıas are seen as liberal leaders, simply they are likewise portrayed as the town'southward ruling oligarchy (a blazon of government where power is exercised by few members, frequently of the aforementioned social class).
Merely as interesting to note, in the patriarchal world of the novel, is the fact that a adult female—the colonel's mother, Ursula—is the merely i capable of irresolute his corrupt behavior. Ursula is indeed one of the pillars that sustains the novel. The fictionalized wars of Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa mirror the many civil wars Colombia fought during the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.
The novel'due south account of how Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa fought thirty- two wars and lost them all seems to capture the exaggeration of magic realism, simply the history of Colombia records endless major uprisings between 1821 and 1930. During those years, some historians have documented betwixt seventy and eighty wars. Reality, then, is sometimes equally difficult to believe as fantasy itself. If the character of Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa was modeled after Full general Rafael Uribe Uribe, as some scholars have suggested, then reality once once again surpasses fiction. As Regina Janes wrote,
Uribe Uribe outdid Aureliano Buend ́ıa in the length if non the intensity of his armed services career, since he lasted almost thirty years from his participation at the age of seventeen in the state of war of 1876–1877 through the other conflicts to 1902. (Janes 1989, 135)
In the aforementioned vain, the narrative makes references to American colonialism every bit expressed through the exploitation of banana plantations. To this issue, the narrative describes the banana strike of 1928, once over again mixing fact and fiction.
When reading Ane Hundred Years of Solitude, the reader misses something if he or she thinks that it recreates only the past of Latin America and ignores the current time when the novel was published—the tardily 1960s. The violence that Colombia was undergoing in the 1960s is not dealt with in the same mode that the "Novel of the Violence" deals with it. From 1948 to 1964, Colombia underwent a number of assassinations that were referred to as La violencia (the Violence). A good number of novels written almost such events were published and are often chosen "Novels of the Violence." 1 Hundred Years of Solitude picks up on the events of La violencia but mixes Garc ́ıa Ma ́rquez's experiences with the civil wars of the nineteenth century and the banana strike of 1928, the three nigh important historical events according to critics and scholars of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Having mixed these events with a strong emphasis on myth, fantasy, humour, and magic realism, I Hundred Years of Solitude might be attacked for not being politically involved. What readers have to consider, however, is that politics in Ane Hundred Years of Solitude are in the groundwork and disguised through magic realism while the art of storytelling takes the foreground.
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Source: Rubén Pelayo – Gabriel García Márquez A Critical Companion (2001, Greenwood)
Categories: Latin American Literature, Literary Criticism, Literature, Magical Realism, Novel Analysis
Source: https://literariness.org/2020/09/24/analysis-of-marquezs-one-hundred-years-of-solitude/
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