One Hundred Years of Summer!

Bahar Baharloo
Ms. Clapp
English AP Literature
Summer Reading Analysis

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece carefully unfolds the creation and inevitable destruction of the town of Macondo, and the history of the curious Buendía family. If I hadn’t began with How to Read Literature like a Professor, many elements of this rich novel would have been a complete mystery. I believe that Márquez’s writing style is pure literary genius, and without the “decoder”, I would not have been able to understand the high level he writes at. Márquez creates a situation for every chapter of How to Read to flesh out. Within this story, he makes strong statements about sexuality, politics, and human nature in a charmingly subtle manner. His narrative style is an intriguing method because what he depicts may be an impossible, fantastic event, yet his casual tone makes it seem familiar and ordinary. Márquez’s beliefs and statements shine through his literary techniques, and I have been able to pick them out using what I have taken from How To Read.
One of the most important things that How To Read has enlightened me to is the concept of “intertextuality”, or the “conversations” that one text has with many other older ones. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, these “conversations” are evident in the plot movement and conclusion. A predominant theme in this novel is the usage of myths. many biblical and Greek mythological references have arisen throughout the story, and some events are quite parallel.
As a whole, Macondo begins as an ideal paradise, quite similar to God’s Eden, and ends as a hot, desolate wasteland, much like the apocalypse. The town is founded by a herd of innocent people, more importantly the Adam and Eve characters, José Arcadio and Úrsula Iguarán Buendía. They begin their long family line who all experience the slow dilapidation of the town. What is also quite interesting is that the most damaging of all of the town’s obstacles is the invasion of the banana company. Adam and Eve’s downfall was the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Bananas were the cause of the destruction of Macondo, or Eden. Also, after the war, rain, and heat, Macondo is wiped off the planet entirely, as well as any trace of it’s existence. Since the town has little contact with its surrounding countries, the disappearance of the town resembles the apocalypse. Another biblical occurrence is Remedios the Beauty’s ascension to the heavens. She was also an Eve figure, given that she “wandered naked through the house because her nature rejected all manner of convention”. She was the only Buendía that did not suffer from their terrible fate, and she represented the simple times before the banana company and the new technology that had invaded the town. A vision of neanderthals came to mind when Márquez mentions “it was necessary to keep an eye on her so that she would not paint little animals on the walls with a stick daubed in her own excrement”. The innocence of Macondo literally ascended to heaven and was never heard from again.
The Greek Myths are also a part of the plot movement as well. Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex’s plot has similarities to the Buendía dilemma. King Lauis is warned by the oracle at Delphi not to have a child by his wife, Jocasta, or it will end in his demise. Since José Arcadio and Úrsula Iguarán are cousins, there is a perpetual fear that one of the Buendía children would be born with the tail of a pig. This doesn’t happen until the very end of the novel when nephew and aunt Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula unwittingly fall in love and have a child, who fulfills the “prophecy.” Amaranta Úrsula dies of childbirth whereas Jocasta commits suicide. The child is devoured by ants, and yet Oedipus blinds himself. Aureliano Babilonia remains living, like Oedipus. A slight comparison that I’ve made is that according to How to Read, being blind might mean seeing more than a physical limitation. Since Oedipus can easily be compared to Aureliano Babilonia, I believe that the parchments that were eventually deciphered at the end of the story can easily be compared to the blindness of Oedipus. The parchments revealed the whole history of the Buendía family, past, present, and future. This is most definitely “sight” farther than physical limitations.
Also, in Grecian belief, there was no possible way to avoid fate. A person was born with the life they were meant to lead, and the appropriately names “Fates” would follow their every move until death– which they also chose the time of. Melquíades’s parchments were the Fates’ plan for the Buendía family. This is also shown through the renaming of their children, “José Arcadio, Úrsula, Aureliano” etcetera. At one point Úrsula openly shows her opposition to name another child the traditional way, but it’s never broken. All Aurelianos turn out introspective and indifferent, while all José Arcadios end up passionate and inventive. “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 axle."
Intertextuality is very evident throughout the passage of this story, and without How to Read, I would have missed the conversations that this novel had with its seniors. The references to the bible and greek stories created a multilayered tale that was enjoyable through and through. Thomas Foster writes "the more we become aware of the possibility that our text is speaking to other texts, the more similarities and correspondences we begin to notice, and the more alive the text becomes." One Hundred Years of Solitude was certainly alive with these correspondences. Márquez’s recount of the Buendía family’s humorous, heart wrenching, and slightly haunting existence will remain with me for ages to come.