One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez achieved international acclaim with his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. 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. The novel covers that history through six generations of the descendants of the founder of the town, JosT Arcadio Buendia, and that history is also the history of a national decline. Marquez uses the town of Macondo as a smaller representation of his own Colombia, but he also uses it as a reflection of world history..

The plot does not do justice to the structure and complexity of the story, but an outline of the essential story is possible. 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 f

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in his growing madness becomes weaker, leaving Ursula more and more as the center of the town while he degenerates in his scientific studies. Her importance to the family is reflected in the Ursula who lives 100 years later, Amaranta Ursula, married to another Aureliano, who believes that she is his sister but who is actually his aunt. It is their child who is born with a pig's tail, ending the line just as Ursula and JosT started it. JosT is the founder of Macondo, and his degeneration foretells the degeneration of the town to a great degree. His life, attitudes, and sensibilities are handed down from generation to generation, protected at first by Ursula but also generated and maintained by the prophecies embodied in the strange writings of Melquiades. The later Aureliano discovers how to decipher the writings and finds that his family's history has been foretold. Melquiades is a strange and interesting character when he is alive and when he is dead. He introduces JosT and the others to ice, among other inventions and wonders. He is also the first death in Macondo, and this after JosT has stated: "A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground" (14). Melquiades is both the first person

Category: Literature - O