Bright Summaries - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide

Jos Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguarn are an emblematic couple, behind the six Buendia generations and the village of Macondo. Despite their fears that, according to legend, an incestuous couple would bear a child with a pigs tail, the two cousins decide to start a family. When their children are born, they are relieved to see that neither Jos Arcadio, nor Aureliano nor Amaranta are deformed. Their family continues to grow when they adopt Rebecca, an Indian orphan, and Arcadio, the son of Jos Arcadio and Pilar Ternera. They decide to raise them as their own children: Arcadio never discovers that the people who raised him are actually his grandparents.

Then the second generation flies the nest: Aureliano has a child with Pilar, who is called Aureliano Jos, but also has 17 others during the war, all to different mothers and all named after him. Jos Arcadio, who has just returned from a journey with a group of travellers, falls for his adoptive sister Rebecca and decides to marry her. Amaranta, on the other hand, remains a spinster, although she does have a special relationship with her nephew, Aureliano Jos.

In the third generation, although Arcadio is the only one to have children (Remedios, Jos Arcadio II and Aureliano II), he does not raise them, as he dies when they are still very young. Aureliano II is also the only one to have children: Amaranta Ursula, Jos Arcadio and Renata Remedios. Renata, his youngest, has intimate relations with Mauricio Babilonia when they are not married, and is therefore sent to a convent where she gives birth to their son, Aureliano Babilonia.

The parenthood of this child is kept secret and it is therefore unknowingly that he falls in love with his aunt, Amaranta Ursula. From this incestuous relationship, Aureliano, the last of the Buendias, is born, cursed with a pigs tail, just as the legend predicted. His mother dies in childbirth and his father, overcome with grief, forgets about the child, thus causing the infants death. Aureliano Babilonia then isolates himself completely from the outside world and sets to work translating the manuscripts of the traveller Melquades.

Following a fight in which Jos Arcadio Buendia kills his enemy Prudencio Aguilar, he decides to leave his village, as he is haunted by the ghost of his victim. Under the pretext of an expedition to find the ocean and build a new town there, he leaves, with several other families. After months of searching in vain, they settle in a place which will become the village of Macondo.

Initially, this small village is self-sufficient, completely isolated from the outside world, but gradually travellers start to go there, bringing the most recent inventions notably mirrors and flying carpets and the countrys news. Thus begins the expansion of Macondo, of which the first stage is the arrival of the first foreign family, the Moscotes. Don Apolinar Moscote wants to run the small town in accordance with the conservative government, and instigates the first political conflicts: the inhabitants then divide into two groups, liberals and conservatives. Aureliano Buendia then leads a rebellion which will cause a civil war in which both factions are opposed throughout the country.

Macondo, thanks to the development of its trade, small businesses and means of communication, becomes a significant modern town in the region. However, the first signs of decline begin to show. Firstly, following a strike on a banana plantation, all the workers are killed by the national army. Then there are the torrential rains, which plague Macondo for almost five years, isolating it again from the rest of the world and causing the exile of many inhabitants. The town, in the same way as the Buendia family, gradually falls into oblivion and solitude. Intense winds destroy the last signs of life in the village, leaving nothing behind them.

Melquades, the leader of a group of travellers, goes to Macondo every spring, before the villages expansion period. Early on, Jos Arcadio Buendia befriends this mysterious man who brings him hundreds of miraculous things. After his death and resurrection, Melquades is welcomed by the Buendias, and begins writing manuscripts that nobody can decipher. This is in fact the inscription of the curse that condemns the family to one hundred years of solitude, oblivion and collapse.

The first signs of this curse appear just after the arrival of Rebecca in Macondo. These are the plague of insomnia and the plague of oblivion. From then onwards, the inhabitants affected by these evils no longer sleep and forget everything, including their past and the names of simple objects. But a potion provided by Melquades cures these illnesses. Unfortunately, the solution is only temporary and the condemnation will take more radical forms as time passes: the solitude and isolation of the Buendia family, whom nobody remembers; the torrential rains and the winds that destroy Macondo. Only Aureliano Babilonia, the last survivor of his family, manages to decipher these manuscripts. However, as he reads, he realises that he cannot stop reading as, when he finishes the last lines, both the village and himself will be destroyed.