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100 Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
magical realism within imagination
Narration controls the atmosphere; characters direct the plot. Time is the issue being dealt with between both plains. Gabriel Garcia Marquez used an ever-changing, multi-contextual, and fully developed theme of time, in his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. Imagination warped this perspective, as we see mainly through the eyes of the archetype of the pioneer, Jose Arcadio Buendia. That aspect he mastered control of, in the beginning, is his undoing as fate plays a role in the downfall of his mind, and evidently, his town of Macondo.
In terms of point of view and place, Marquez used his control over language to recreate a path not yet followed by readers as he gently lead us into the land of magical realism.
Magical realism is a technique in literature used to tell a tale through a warped perception, getting the reader to use a refreshing new view. The imagination of the men in Macondo follows a pattern we can learn from. At a young age they sense these grand ideas of possibility, and visions of the future. When this adrenaline begins to slow with age they crash.
Macondo started off like an Eden in need of development and growth. Marquez called it “a paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin.” (Page 12) It was a time of bonding between man and nature. But this life was not enough for Jose Arcadio Buendia; he gravitated to the gypsies for technology.
Time appears to slow down as a project is underway, but speeds up as a result of a new advancement is completed. Later in the novel the transition between the time of Buendia and curiosity, and the complete and utter industrialization of Macondo cannot be found. This process happened a bit too quickly, and sent Jose Arcadio Buendia into a fit of confusion. When a train was built, the perfect symbolism of connection, he lost his mind, and rightfully so. There was a banana company that had been creeping into the picture that then exploded into everything he was against. When it took over Macondo his world was no longer under his control, and therefore there was no reason for him, or anyone, to be a part of something so corporately demanding.
The way he lived on was through the memory of his family, as they passed his stories down through the generations. Through memory they were selective with chosen stories. Timelines disappeared as he was removed from earthly possessions to be recreated, becoming ageless, timeless, and forming into this contextual image.
Chapter 10 starts off using four different generations to point out in the timeline where memory has landed them. It is a very cyclical view, as if their history could somehow fit on a globe, and Marquez was able to spin the globe, touch a place, and by using the metaphorical latitude and longitude (years away from creation to destruction) he could pin-point which generation was being referred to.
Aureliano Segundo decided to name the baby Jose Arcadio, there is a reference to a yet fifth generation, going back to the pioneer from when Macondo was an Eden of opportunity.
The Eden was replaced by big business, this banana company, in need of supply and demand. Gypsies brought a cure for the plague of forgetting, with medical undertones to their ailments. It could prevent the fear people had of corporations.
The fantastical delivered a child born with a pig’s tail, signaling the end of civilization. All the people of Macondo had worked for was reverted back to an animal form, as a punishment from God for biting off more than they could ever chew.
To free himself from the hell now growing like wild fire on earth, Colonel Aureliano Buendia decided to end his life. He failed here; as he failed in so many other things.
Searches for answers lead Aureliano Babilonia and Jose Segundo to discover the parchments of Melquiades, six generations back, as they heard of the waning fate and were aware of the time that his village had left. Predictions looked unfortunate; they needed to know why.
He could not pull himself away from the works, or what they meant. The ending of the novel makes the entire search come full circle, answering every question that the book had asked.
Understanding alleviated the need to search. Once he had all the answers, lying there in front of him, his life, and the life left in Macondo had no reason to go on. The brilliance of the characters that Marquez had overturned is that they each humbly know when their time is up. Such rare beauty is hard to find, and he managed to make an entire village understand the concept.
Pilar Ternera’s death could be mentioned as another example of the cyclical themes in the novel, but the book does not place an emphasis on death. Its characters use up their momentum at an early age, staying in isolation to think. Jose Segundo and Aureliano Babilonia locked themselves in the cave to read the parchments, and outside time appeared to stop when they needed their own. Time was something up for grabbing to Marquez, for those who needed to conger out their thoughts.
The solitude of all these characters plays the most important part in understanding the novel’s main concept of time. It is a gift granted when wanted at will, if used for a reason. Time can be cruel when it is playing its hard against us, but when we offer it a resolution to the present it can postpone the future graciously.
The irony of time in this story (because there is a strong sense of tragedy in the novel) is when we discover that there is a necessary limit to how much we take. There is no specific part of the novel that points this out, but we can see a pattern of these brilliant thinkers staying in isolation so long that they go insane. No one discovered where the medium was, which is also an important concept to notice, because there is no medium.
Title: 100 Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Publisher: essential.penguin
Review written by: Kristyna Serdock
Reviewer's Rating:7
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
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