In his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has the town of Macondo serve as a symbolic representation of Colombia, the author's own country. This is a novel with a broad view of human nature, using the landscape of a town and its history as background. The novel tells the history of the town of Macondo and details that history through six generations of the descendants of the founder of the town, JosT Arcadio Buendia. This history is also a history of national decline, and Marquez extends the metaphor of Macondo not only to Colombia but to the world as a whole. He accomplishes this in a novel making use of fantastic elements told in a matter-of-fact way that helps the reader accept them and that connects them more firmly to the real world, and Marquez uses the technique of foreshadowing to link periods in the history of Macondo and to link Macondo with a larger sense of pattern in the universe.
In the structure of the novel, Marquez foreshadows much of what happens and uses supernatural abilities to see into the future to bring out what will happen and to make time in essence seem to be unified. That is, the events at any given stage related to what has gone before, lead to what is to come, and yet seem to all be taking place at the same time because the future and past are both known, set in the writings of Melquiades and the prophecies of the first Aureliano. This unifying of different time periods is seen in the opening sentence:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice (1).
The style of language is basically simple and direct, but complexity is introduced in the depth of description offered and in the prominence given to the actions and emotions of the main characters. The book covers a great deal of time without losing the reader in a maze of changing details. The town stays...