Name : VICTORIA CHESKA BATISTIS

Year and Section : BACHELOR IN ENGLISH EDUCATION-II

FINAL OUTPUT 1
Write a 3-5 pages Literary Analysis about the Novel One Hundred Years
of Solitude

DESTINIES WRITTEN IN CYCLES

What would you do if sharing just a name with a person is enough for you to inherit their
fate? What would you do if every action that you take is one that has already been foretold and is
inherently meaningless in the grand scheme of things? What do you really think drives progress?

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, I encountered a theme that had made my first reading
of it utterly incomprehensible, visibly confusing, and downright frustrating. It was the fact that in
the use of Magic Realism by Gabriel García Márquez, he has created a story so bizarre in its use
of time, language, and the nature of humanity that reading it all made me very weary. The story
progresses so strangely repetitively, that it has made all things seem so meaningless to know the
development of the characters when you already know the fate of every similarly named person,
even those who are thought to be switched at birth with their names but corrected by their death.
Now, the tale of the novel narrates the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose
patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the town of Macondo.

It is a book cited as one of the best pieces of literature, and I wouldn’t argue against that
with good reason. By the end of the novel, when all of them had fallen into ruin by the hands of
capitalism and human progress, I have realized that the cyclical nature of their life and deaths can
be as utterly unfavorable to them as it is to us. For everything in the narrated lives has passed and
will come to pass, but in itself is also existing. It is a story that uses language to give us a peek in
the generational cycle of rise and ruin through a family that will help itself, fall in itself, as they
will devour each other. A clever plot with mysticism to deliver to us prettily a generally cynical
view of a cyclical life.
 From the names that return generation after generation to the repetition of personalities and
events, time in One Hundred Years of Solitude refuses to divide neatly into past, present, and
future. Úrsula Iguarán, the backbone of the family and the one we may call on as the central
protagonist, is always the first to notice that time in Macondo is not finite, but, rather, moves
forward over and over again. Sometimes, this simultaneity of time leads to a forgetfulness that
borders on amnesia, when people cannot see the past any more than they can see the future. Other
times the future becomes as easy to recall as the past. It gives the story a rather strange timeline,
one where the readers can see the past, present, and future as almost one and the same even when
the events are happening as we read it. The prophecies of Melquíades prove that events in time are
continuous: from the beginning of the novel, the old gypsy was able to see its end, as if the various
events were all occurring at once. Similarly, the presence of the ghosts of Melquíades and José
Arcadio Buendía shows that the past in which those men lived has become one with the present.
All of these strange occurrences are accepted as part of reality, unexplained to us, and yet it persists
in the entirety of the novel.

In the novel, there are beliefs that tethers them to the family, separates them, or sometimes
both as they become inquisitive of the nature of their life. And it is these beliefs that connect them
to time and their relationship with it also. As the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude
consider total forgetfulness a danger, they, ironically, also seem to consider memory a burden.

Memories, something that we must grapple with in solitude or in the company of others, is
without a doubt an important aspect of how we determine the time of our lives. Time where we
may look back on memories, create memories in the present, and be optimistic with the thought of
the future where we may be offered new memories. As we may observe, however, about half of
the novel’s characters speak of the weight of having too many memories while the rest seem to be
amnesiacs. In Rebeca’s case, we see an overabundance of memory. One where she looks only at
the past, which causes her to lock herself in her house after her husband’s death, and to live there
with the memory of friends rather than the presence of people. For her, the nostalgia of better days
gone by prevents her from existing in a changing world. The opposite of her character can be
found in Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who has almost no memories at all. He lives in an endless
repeating present, melting down and then recreating his collection of little gold fishes. One where
he may have a concept of how the future might see him, as of what he had done to his gold fishes.
When in disgust, Aureliano recognizes that people are using him as a figurehead, a mythological
hero that represents whatever they want it to represent. When he begins to understand that the little
gold fishes no longer are symbolic of him personally, but instead of a mistaken ideal, he stops
making new fishes and starts to melt down the old ones again and again. Nostalgia and amnesia
are the dual diseases of the Buendía clan, one tying its victims to the past, the other trapping them
in the present. Thus afflicted, the Buendías are doomed to repeat the same cycles until they
consume themselves, and they are never able to move into the future.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, connection to the outside comes human progress and
human degradation for the benefit of others, a capitalistic world that strives for keeping a clear line
between who should maintain power and who should struggle to just be heard. The railroad
represents the arrival of the modern world in Macondo. This devastating turn leads to the
development of a banana plantation and the ensuing massacre of three thousand workers. The
railroad also represents the period when Macondo is connected most closely with the outside
world. After the banana plantations close down, the railroad falls into disrepair and the train ceases
even to stop in Macondo any more. The advent of the railroad is a turning point. Before it comes,
Macondo grows bigger and thrives; afterward, Macondo quickly disintegrates, folding back into
isolation and eventually expiring. And it is in this isolation that we know again the rise of
incesteous relationships as it had in the past to help support a cultivation of growth whose roots
will be forgotten even as the burden it has remains.

As the Buendía family’s history duplicates itself, the characters in the novel become
familiarized with the absurdity of their present situations. However, such characters do not raise
awareness for these irrational cyclical events. In the novel, “Úrsula confirmed her impression that
time was going in a circle”. She feels “as if time had turned around and [they] were back at the
beginning”. Ursula is one of the few characters that notices the recurrence of odd events in her
village, yet she does not take any direct initiative to stop the cycle; just like other characters
throughout the village’s commotive history. The characters that recognize catastrophic events, but
do not make any conscious effort to end them; resemble the destructive naturalistic history of the
metaphoric village.

One Hundred Years of Solitude’s plot advancement relies on the regeneration of cycles
within a linear narrative structure. By the end of the novel, when the Buendía’s are blown off the
face of the earth by a hurricane, the last character, Aureliano, “wandered aimlessly through the
town”. Since the Buendía’s revolve around restating their family’s history, Aureliano is stranded
and left with no connection to the past. Due to his dependence on his family’s history, he begins
“searching for an entrance that [goes] back to the past”. Aureliano desperately searches for a tie to
his old way of life in order to salvage himself and his family’s legacy. When he fails to revive his
family’s past historical events, he and his family are condemned to obliteration due to their
independence and abandonment of their history. At the end of the novel, when there is no
connection to their past or recreational source of tragedy, the ability to form another cycle is gone.
Thus, the cyclical nature of plot regeneration is extinguished.

Garcia Marquez’s simultaneous linear and cyclical structure in his work One Hundred
Years of Solitude follows an axle and wheel metaphor for time that further defines the Buendía
family’s nature. In the novel, Pietro Crespi describes the Buendia family nature as “a machine with
unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not
for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle”. The wheel is the novel’s temporal
mechanism, the axle represents linear time, and the turning of the wheel represents cyclical time.
This metaphor provides an imaginative representation of the technique and also demonstrates the
concept Marquez has developed through his intentional repetitive writing. The idea of this
everlasting circular time exhibits the deformity the village of Macondo experiences. The events
Marquez incorporates into this cyclical structure, like incest, are destructive to the social time
period; thus, allowing the plot device to act as an instrument for disease. The Buendía family’s
reliance on the past, in order to advance into the future, is one that demonstrates the unnatural
destructive mentality the characters have. Through emphasis of cyclical repetitive events within a
broad linear hundred year time frame, Garcia Marquez augments the role of these recurring events
and portrays their destructive capabilities within a metaphorical town intended to mirror that of
Colombia.