One Hundred Years Of Solitude III

WOW!!! I finally have access to a computer. I finished ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE a few days ago and have been trying to remember everything I had to say so that i could type it now.

Well to start off I absolutley loved the book. Yes, it was long and at times confusing with all the characters' names, but I have to admit that I was glued to the novel. Marquez has this way of being so descriptive that the reader can easily imagine everything he or she is reading. Throughout the novel I often forgot that it was fiction and I becaame so engrossed in the lives of the characters.

Moving on to the topic of the banana company that otehrs talked about already: First off, I thought it was just another example of how outside forces slowly destroyed the town of Macondo. The banana company reminded me of the Dutch men who went into Africa during the age of Imperialism and made the natives pick rubber. The men would be overworked and underpayed and very often beaten for not meeting the day's quota. In the case of the novel, the situation was not so severe, but I just tied the two things together (because I'm a history geek). Another point I wanted to mention about that part of the book was when the massacre occured. How could it be that no one recalled the event? Only the one boy who was on Jose Arcadio Segundo's shoulders and Jose Arcadio Segundo himself rememeber that the guns went off and all the workers and their families were killed. From pages 302- 310, Marquez writes about the event and Jose Arcadio Segundo waking up in a train-car filled with the bodies of the 3000 dead people. Pages 306-307 remind me of stories of the Holocaust in which Jewish families were packed into train-cars and transported to camps or in the movie Hotel Rwanda where the dead bodies were being tossed into massive graves. How is it that the government got the people of Macondo to believe that the massacre never happened???

I also wanted to add on to what Mary already mentioned about how much the story changed from the beginning to the end. In the beginning Macondo was so alive with the people building thier new homes and starting new lives. I would easily ;picture the colorful houses and all the green around the town. By the end the town was so depressing and i picture it being all browna and dried out. In the beginning the Buendia family was growing with the town and by the end its lineage died just as life in the town was dying as well.

I wanted to bring attention to a passage in which Aureliano went crying and seeking help to Pilar Ternera because he was in love with Amaranta Ursula. Pilar asked the girl's name and "When Aureliano told her, Pilar Ternera let out a deep laugh, the old expansive laugh that ended up as a cooing of doves. There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axel," (396). In this passage Marquez does an excellent job of describing the legacy of the Buendia family and how their fates keep repeating. The image of the axel wearing out is an allusion as to the end of the Buendia family.

One final thing I wanted to comment on was the end of the novel. By the very end Melquiades' papers were revealed and they said that, "The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants," (413). I found it sort of magical how Melquides pretty much new everything all along. He new the fate of the Buendia family and it was interesting how Jose Arcadio Buendia died at the tree and how Aureliano died being eaten by ants. It made me think about fate and destiny and about how much in life we can control and how much is already layed out for us. As much as the characters tried to do their own thing and follow different paths, they all had the Buendia fate which made them all alike.

Oh yes, one last thing (I promise). What does Marquez mean by, "races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth," (417)? Its such a poetic way of ending the novel (with the title in it) but what exactly is meant by it?