One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude narrates the inseparability of the past, present and future in the imaginary town of Macondo, Columbia and the folks who established it, the Buendias. Macondo used to be secluded from the outside world but during a time-span of one hundred years that was joined by births, deaths, marriages and love affairs, the town began to develop its culture and views about life that directed the Buendias in creating ghosts that haunted them as the novel draws its conclusion. Marquez’s style in creating a fictional rural town of Macondo as the setting of the novel is perfect; as a reader, I believe that Marquez used this town to tell the readers that the novel will be about the movement between past, present and future. In the beginning of the story, it is stated that Macondo is isolated but as time passed by, industrializations, revolutions and wars reached the town that led to its destruction that made the town isolated again just like what it was a hundred years ago. Marquez did not focus to an individual but he used the Buendia family to become the protagonists of the story. If you’re going to look closely, you will realize that the outside forces are not the antagonists but it’s the past which ended the story. The novel was written in an omniscient third person point of view, which allows the readers to know every feeling and thought that each Buendia has. The theme of the novel is about the reality that can be felt by different people with unique backgrounds not by the way a single person observes it; a reality that conveys the incorporation of the superstition to the real world and Marquez also wants to emphasize that time can be cyclic, it can repeat itself.

Marquez used a lot of literary devices such as symbolisms, motifs and foreshadowing. The author used the railroad to symbolize the arrival of the modern world in Macondo. One can say that the names of the members of the Buendias want to signify something. In the span of six generations, the men of the family are named Jose Arcadio or Aureliano that suggests that you can’t simply tell their differences because Marquez wants to tell us that these people are all the same in the sense that they keep on repeating the same mistakes that was done by their ancestors.