Senna - CliffsNotes on Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude

Copyright 1999 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

All rights reserved.

www.hmhco.com

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

Trademarks: CliffsNotes, the CliffsNotes logo, Cliffs, cliffsnotes.com, and all related trademarks, logos, and trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

eISBN 978-0-544-18312-4

v1.0715

Of all the works by Garca Mrquez, this novel is the most fascinating and the most complex. From the very beginning, we recognize the same elementsalbeit, more elaborate onesas those of the characters and situations in his shorter fiction. In the words of the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa: One Hundred Years of Solitude extends and magnifies the world erected by his previous books. Indeed, the novel is a brilliant amalgamation of elements from all of Garca Mrquez previous stories, including elements from the fiction of other American novelists, biblical parables, and personal experiences known only to the author.

The basic structure of the novel traces the chronicle of the Buenda family over a century. It is the history of a family with inescapable repetitions, confusions, and progressive decline. Beginning sometime in the early nineteenth century, the novels time span covers the familys rise and fall from the foundation of Macondo by the youthful patriarch, Jos Arcadio Buenda, until the death of the last member of the line. Throughout the narrative, the fates of the Buendas and Macondo are parallel reflections. In fact, we witness the history of a people who, like the wandering tribes of Israel, are best understood in terms of their genesis from a single family.

One Hundred Years of Solitude exaggerates events and personal characteristics to such a degree that it is very difficult to define its predominant aim. Sometimes it seems to be satire; at other times it appears to be an evocation of the magical. Perhaps we can be safest in observing that the novel demonstrates that the line between fantasy and reality is very arbitrary. It shows, for instance, that our sense of technical and material progress is relative, and that backwardness, for instance, can be caused as much by social isolation as by historical distance in time. Everything depends upon ones cultural reference. A commonplace telescope is a fabulous instrument to either people isolated from modern civilization, or, at some time or another, to all children.

One Hundred Years of Solitude consists of twenty unnumbered chapters or episodes. The first chapter narrates the genesis of the Buenda clan in the fictional town of Macondo. The story begins in the memory of Colonel Aureliano Buenda, son of Macondos founder, as he recalls the first time that his father took him to discover ice. The Colonels memory evokes a pristine world, but this moment is overshadowed by the fact that he is facing a firing squad. At once, the omniscient narrator makes us aware that we are in the memory of a character as well as listening to a historical myth. Having lived in physical isolation, as well as psychological solitude, the people of Macondo learn about progress from the wandering gypsiesone of whom, Melquades, possesses a manuscript in Sanskrit code that contains the history and fate of the Buenda family. This narrative will be the manuscript that is being decoded by the last adult Buenda just before he dies. The novel will constantly shift through time, so that memory and linear, chronicle time are mixed together in order to give the action a mournful, ghostly tone.

The Colonels childhood memoryas he faces an execution squadintroduces us to the irony of Macondo, an ebullient jungle village that time had once forgotten and that was located at a point that seemed eternally sad. In the beginning, before progress came to Macondo, Jos Arcadio Buenda and his wife, rsula, because they were cousins, lived in fear of begetting a child with a pigs tail. We are told that a boy with such a tail had been born to rsulas aunt and Jos Arcadio Buendas uncle. This fear is later to be realized in the love affair between the only remaining Buendas, the bookish Aureliano Babilonia and his aunt, Amaranta rsula. Incest, then, becomes the original sin that threatens six succeeding generations of Buendas. From the fear of having a baby with a pigs tail, the novels principal theme of solitude is psychological, as much as geographical; their hereditary fear gives them an irrational zeal for the fantastic, and it cripples their ability for sincere love and honest communication.

After her marriage to Jos Arcadio Buenda, rsula refuses to consummate their union for fear of conceiving a monster. She wears a chastity belt to prevent her husband from having intercourse with her. One day, however, Jos Arcadio Buenda defeats a poor loser in a cockfight. Prudencio Aguilar taunts the young Buenda about rsulas virginity, an insult that is aimed at Jos Arcadios manhood. Jos Arcadio, in an impetuous rage, throws an ancient spear through Aguilars throat and kills him. rsula later sees the dead mans ghost trying to plug the hole in his throat with a plug of esparto grass.

Aguilars ghost haunts the couple until they are forced to flee their ancestral village. Thus, the Buendas set out with some of their friends on a long journey through the jungle. Two exhausting years later, after camping in the wilds one night, Jos Arcadio Buenda has a dream about a city of houses with mirrored walls. He takes this dream as a divine sign, and he convinces his followers to build Macondo on the very site.

When Jos Arcadio Buenda, his wife rsula, and some twenty other adventurers settle there, the world is said to be so recent that many things do not have names and thus it was necessary to point. Jos Arcadio organizes his small settlement into a model community. Yet there is already something strange about it. Jos Arcadio had planned the streets so as to shade all the homes from the tropical sun, but Macondo remains a burning place where the hinges and door knockers melt with the heat, a peninsula surrounded by water where water was never known to be. When a heat wave occurs in Macondo, men and beasts go mad and birds attack houses; later, the town is afflicted by a plague of insomnia, and, even later, things have to be labeled. Eventually these labels have to be placed in the context of a things function. Occurring shortly after Rebecas mysterious arrival, the insomnia plague not only causes the loss of memory but prevents sleep. The result is that the townspeople stay up nights amusing one another with nonsensical tales like the one about the capon: