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.