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.