One Hundred Years of Solitude Blog Post 4

Gill Hurtig

Blog Post 4

Romano 5

10.15.14

One Hundred Years of Solitude Blog Post 4

When Aureliano finally starts to die, he stops making the fish he had been making his entire life. It seems as though him making the fish is directly correlated with him living. That certainly could be a religious symbol. I reread the beginning of the book, and noticed when Marquez mentions multiple times that Aureliano took a liking to making metal fish. I would not have noticed the prevalence of the fish if I had not reread much of the beginning of the book (like Nabokov and O’Connor suggested). It seems as though while Christianity saved him, it killed his seventeen sons. Every son was shot right in the cross on their forehead. “His seventeen sons were hunted down like rabbits by invisible criminals who aimed at the center of their crosses of ash” (238). This isn’t the only time religion makes a significant appearance in the book. There are many more that I’m still trying to grapple with, such as the prosperity between Petra Coats and Aureliano Segundo. Another sign of Christianity is noticed through the ghosts throughout the story.

The continuous sight of ghosts in Macondo is a foreshadow of the eventual return of Macondo the way it was originally found. Completely uninhabited and isolated from the world. Marquez continues to bring back characters from the dead because he wants to remind us of what Macondo was like at the beginning of the story. There are many moments late in the book that resemble moments earlier in the book. For instance, when Remedios is lifted up in the air and taken to heaven, it resembles earlier when the Pope levitated six inches off the ground. Also, the sudden forgetfulness by the town of the massacre is very similar to when the entire town developed insomnia and couldn’t remember anything. These parallels between the beginning and the end of the book are Marquez attempting to draw us back to the beginning, to force us to remember when Macondo was first becoming a town. He wants us to realize that eventually it will return to it’s original state.

The theme of the book is the idea that with birth comes death. At the beginning of the novel, the town was safe from death because death had not found any of them yet. Eventually once one person died, it set off a chain reaction in which people started to die left and right. There is eventually no escaping the grasp of death, as Remedios did it partially, but then levitated up to heaven. Eventually, after everything in the town has been killed, the town itself seems to die, and retract back to it’s earliest stage when Jose Arcadia Buendia first found it. Just reading the book closely, and noticing all of the births and deaths that occur throughout the novel, the theme seemed simple to me. The very end of the book shows how the entire family/town went full circle, from birth to death. The town that had originally not been known by anybody, had now been completely erased from memory, and once again, not known by anybody.

At one point, even Macondo experiences rebirth after the five year rain. This downpour acted as a baptism for the town, although not necessarily a good one. It was the first real time when I began to notice that the town was retracting back to it’s earliest state. The banana fields washed away, and people lost their memory, as nobody had any recollection of the huge massacre. The Buendia family, who were the original settlers of the town, were the last ones left to see the town go. In my first blog post I mentioned ice being a possible symbol for rebirth, and while I’m still quite confident that ice is very important in the story, I have not figured out what it’s point is.

This is certainly a book that I would recommend reading if you are up to the task. It is long, and there are too many acts of symbolism to even count. It’s hard enough to keep track of them all, but connecting them in a meaningful way is nearly impossible. Usually it is easy to track a symbol. Just look for something that is repeated a few times and seems out of place. However, in this book, and magical realism in general, it seems as though everything is out of place. It certainly helped me to learn how to reread, and stay concentrated while reading, which are both things that Foster and others explained are necessary in good writing.

One Hundred Years of Solitude Blog post 3

Gill Hurtig

Blog post 3

Romano 5

10.15.14

One Hundred Years of Solitude Blog Post 3

Colonel Aureliano Buendia has now had 17 children, all of whom died on the same night. He has lost every single armed uprising he has organized, and yet he hasn’t even been remotely injured. Can he be considered a Christ figure if he can’t be caught by death? “He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse” (103). Before Aureliano was a Colonel, he sculpted metal, which is very similar to a carpenter. And what was he sculpting? Nothing other than little fishes, a symbol for Christianity. But why would Marquez want us to think of Aureliano as a christ figure?

But then again, it doesn’t make sense that he would be considered a Christ figure because he promotes violence so much as a colonel. He also is the father of seventeen sons, from seventeen different women. Jesus certainly did not have that much sex.

At this point, an unhealthy number of people are in love with Amaranta. It seems as though everybody loves her. I consider her almost a vampire figure. She attracted Pietro Crespi earlier in the book. He told her he loved her, and yet she let him down harshly. Aureliano Jose also took a liking to Amaranta (his aunt), and she almost agreed to have sex with him, but right before they did, Amaranta stopped the affair. Aureliano was crushed, so he decided to join the army. Eventually, even Gerinaldo Marquez begins to love her, but she consistently rejects him. “Gerinaldo Marquez had declared his love for Amaranta. At that time she was so illusioned with her lonely passion for Pietro Crespi that she laughed at him” (136). He continued to insist to marry her, and she continued to reject. It is as though she feeds on the love of men, but eventually just turns them down. Amaranta reminds me of Daisy Miller. Both seem to be loved by many guys, and they are somehow able to manipulate the guys without ever giving them anything. The difference is, Amaranta seems to be much more aware of her self-image. She seems to feel things more, as she is found weeping multiple times. Perhaps this is supposed to give her a more humane quality in a book with so many inhumane characters. With that said, she was considering poisoning her sister earlier in the book, so Marquez is signifying her growth as a character.

Lastly, ghosts are once again making appearances, as Melquiades often checks on Aureliano Segundo. Remedios also makes an appearance when she is deemed the queen of a carnival. Why does Marquez continue to bring characters back from the dead? And what do they signify? I’m hoping to answer this in my last blog post at the end of the book.

One Hundred Years of Solitude Blog Post 2

Gill Hurtig

Blog post 2

Romano 5

10.15.14

One Hundred Years of Solitude Blog Post 2

So at one point everybody in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez had insomnia. Every single person in the entire town had it! Not until a “decrepit man” came to Arcadio’s doorstep and gave him an elixer. Due to the chapter “It’s Never Just Illness” in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, I have to assume that there is some kind of metaphor involved. Perhaps because the town had been isolated for so long, they are finally going to start connecting with human culture soon, therefore, they are symbolically waking up from isolation by remembering things again. Or possibly it had to do with the town not yet being discovered by death. Because nobody could die, was it possible that nobody could sleep as well?  That seems like a possibility because Melquiades was the man to give Arcadio the elixir. He was also the first man to die in the town. He was the only man able to sleep because he didn’t have insomnia. In the end he was the first person to die, because he was the only one who could sleep.

Illness curiously occurs throughout the first 100 pages of the book. There is a weird illness Rebeca has where she only eats the earth at the beginning of her stay with the Buendia’s. It reoccurs when she becomes jealous of Amaranta going out with Pietro Crespi. The absurdity of this illness is irregular, and it’s something I will continue to grapple with. She was someone who came to the family randomly from some far off land, so perhaps illness is acquired when someone comes to Macondo due to it’s isolation, and differences from the rest of the world. Marquez could do this just to highlight the differences.

To add on to all this, Remedios dies in an extremely peculiar way. She suddenly “Woke up in the middle of the night soaked in a hot broth which had exploded in her insides with a kind of tearing belch, and she died three days later, poisoned by her own blood, with a pair of twins crossed in her stomach” (86). So Remedios is the second person to die in Macondo, however neither her nor Melquiades had been there from the beginning when it was built. So I wonder if now that death has located Macondo, if people will just start dropping like flies. Perhaps it will only be people who have just settled in Macondo. Or maybe it will only occur when people want it to happen. By the end of Melquiades’ life, everyone pretty much ignored him because he didn’t make any sense anymore. Nobody really cared when he died. For Remedios’ death, Amaranta wanted something to happen to postpone the wedding, and her wish came true. She regretted it once she learned Remedios had died. I’ll keep looking at regret/illness as possible motifs.

Gill Hurtig

Blog post 1

Romano 5

10.15.14

One Hundred Years of Solitude Blog Post 1

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is undoubtedly one of the most symbolic books ever written. I have started it, and so far, it has been difficult for me to make sense of it all. There is a town all by themselves. They know that there are other people somewhere on the face of the earth because of Gypsies that periodically come to the village, but they don’t know where anyone else lives. At one point, most of the town goes on a quest to find other human civilization to the North which ultimately fails. Why is it that this town is so isolated from the rest of the world? And where do these Gypsies come from? For one, I think the gypsies are necessary to exploit the curiosity that Jose Arcadio Buendia has. This powerful curiosity that Jose has is what drives him to marvel over the idea of ice. He says “This is the great invention of our time” (18). It is possible that when he touched ice, he was reborn, as ice is a form of water. He stopped caring at all about the alchemy he was so engrossed by. I also am guessing that he was originally engrossed by the alchemy because it is specifically the change of metals to gold. In a broader sense, that is exactly what Arcadio loves most. He loves change for the better. He attempts to change where he lives, he invents things, and he is intrigued by all the gadgets the gypsies bring to Macondo. This interesting drive he has is something I will keep my eye on.

Between the first and second chapters, there is a change in time. The novel moves backward to when Macondo was first founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia. The setting of the novel is unclear. Marquez points out that “the world was so recent that many things lacked names,” and yet, it has been known for quite awhile that the earth was round. The setting doesn’t make sense, which is something Marquez does on purpose in order to make us focus on the isolation of Macondo, and their lack of connection to the rest of the world.

At this point, Jose Arcadio has had sex twice, which got me thinking about How to Read Literature Like a Professor, and the chapter, “...Except Sex.” In my opinion, Jose Arcadio feels disconnected with his family which is why he chooses to have sex. His father and brother are hard at work in their metal shop room, and his mother is caring for her new-born daughter Amaranta. He has nowhere to go, so he begins to disconnect from the family by having constant sex. He leaves the house for long periods of time in the middle of the night while he has sex with Pilar Ternera. In the end, he falls in love with a gypsy (and I would argue out of love with his family) so he leaves Macondo with the gypsies.