One Hundred Years of Solitude

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:

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with the events alone. War becomes even more senseless than usual in this way, and the people are seen as no more than pawns in a larger pattern they do not control, a connection again with the fact that all has been prophesied. JosT Arcadio Buendia and his family and followers travel south and found the nation of Macondo. Buendia is an innovator, but he becomes so dedicated to science that he is driven mad, leaving his wife, Ursula, to handle the followers thereafter. Macondo is a town to which many people travel. Gypsies are constant visitors, bringing with them new gadgets for sale. Melquiades is their leader, and he writes certain strange manuscripts before his death--he is the first person in Macondo to die. JosT and Ursula were first cousins, so all their descendants live in constant fear of having a child with a pig's tail--a result of degenerative inbreeding. The first child born in Macondo is JosT's son Aureliano, and he seems to have supernatural powers, the ability to predict the future. Ursula disappears for several months, and when she returns it is after discovering a route to a nearby town. She brings many people back with her, and more outsiders follow. Melquiades also comes back--he has been bored by de

Category: Literature - O