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.