f the Buendias in the evolving realm of Macondo in the light of magical realism, an approach which often gives the reader an uneasy, unsteady, even dizzying sensation of "reality." The issue of memory in this magical realism brings to mind a kind of twilight "reality" in between sleep and wakefulness, or in between remembering and forgetting. The difficulties the characters experience in simply deciphering reality in the midst of the chaos of their lives gives them a reason to yield to their powerful adversaries by way of forgetting.
Macondo is populated by poor people, but the life of the village is itself rich with events, relationships, and, at least at the beginning, some measure of hope for change politically and economically. The failure of the realization of hope, justice and freedom is another reason the people tend to choose forgetting rather than remembering. The act of forgetting in such a world of suffering and disappointment is in part an act of survival, an act of adaptation and coping with that great pain.
Macondo in Garcia Marquez is a mixture of African and Spanish cultures which includes parts of both old traditional societies and parts of modern society. Garcia Marquez begins his novel with one of the Buendia family facing a firing squad and reflecting back on what seems to be an Eden-like Macondo, a Macondo which will eventually be revealed as an illusion, an ideal, a community of unrealized hope. However, as the reader begins the novel and is led into the past by way of the future, he or she does not know that what has begun is a process of forgetting, or at least a process in which the past is idealized in part in order to allow the idealizer to live. The fact that the Colonel is facing the firing squad is symbolic of the death of the body, mind and soul which all the denizens of Macondo face, whatever minor power they might have:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
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