One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Garcia Marquez tells the story of a town, Macondo, from its Foundation until its destruction. The different moments and the existence of this town are impressive. We will do a scan of the episodes that include the fictional universe of one hundred years of solitude, we can warn close relationships between language and its different carriers (Narrator and characters), and the reality that describes the novel, the Macondo. Therefore, in the novel by García Márquez, the language of the narrator and the characters acts as constructor of reality.

Contextual analysis:

One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez "El Gabo" in 1967, tells the story of a Colombian family, in which the stylistic influences of the American novelist William Faulkner can be tracked in epic tone.
With Cien Años de Soledad García Márquez it has aroused admiration in many Western countries by the very personal mixture of reality and fantasy that takes place in his narrative works, always located at Macondo, an imaginary city in its country.

García Márquez

Melquiades composed the history of Macondo and its inhabitants. What we are reading, to read the novel, is not more than the parchment in which the Gypsy wrote the story; only that this newly we know it in the outcome of the work. When you finish our reading, also just Macondo. As readers, we are witnessing the Macondo Foundation, to the origins of this people; We are also witnesses of its evolution and finally destroyed. With the development of the life at Macondo, we also know the origin and evolution of its language, which summarizes the history of all human language.
In one hundred years of solitude are several points of view regarding a same historical fact: starts the legend with the location of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Simultaneous and contradictory information declared him victorious in Villanueva, defeated in Guacamayal, devoured by the Indians Motilones, dead in a village of swamp and again rebelled in Urumita.
Similarly, two points of view is projected onto the events that took place in Macondo during the civil war: the massacre told by José Arcadio second version and the official version of events, according to which there was no dead, are two stories which deny the possibility of history as a single fact. The official version, thousand times repeated and crushed nationwide finally prevail: there was no dead, satisfied workers had returned to their families, and the banana company was suspending activities as he passed the rain.
[...] It was still searching and the extermination of the criminals, murderers, arsonists and rioters of the decree number four, but the military denied it own relatives of his victims, who overflowed the office of commanders in search of news. "Insurance that was a dream," insisted the officers.
For the official version, which over time will be considered the true story, at Macondo you nothing has happened, is happening or will never happen. This is a happy town. They were thus the extermination of union bosses.


José Arcadio Buendía, as a young man, accompanied by his men, with women, children and animals, crossed the mountains looking for an outlet to the sea, and twenty-six months after they withdrew their company and Macondo was founded to avoid having to undertake the way back. At the beginning, it was a village that was not sent with papers; When Don Apolinar cited showed the role in which he had been appointed Magistrate of the town, José Arcadio Buendía said: in this town do not send papers. We see the primitive stage of Macondo, where there is prevalence of orality; then, we will see the importance of the written language.
In the early phase of Macondo, in the origins of this town, we find its founders and first inhabitants who are faced with the requirement of nominating who contemplate first and resort to finger-pointing. The world was so recent that many things lacked name, and to mention had to point out them with your finger; Macondo was by then a very recent town; the Narrator emphasizes that a people without dead, is a people without a past. And Macondo was, at the beginning, a people without cemetery. As well as Macondo begins to have existence from its Foundation, there is a fact source that gives existence to this village in the world of the dead:
[...] because Macondo was a village unknown for the dead until it reached Melquiades and noted with a black dot in the multicolored maps of death.
In the second chapter of the novel, José Arcadio (second generation) is going with the Gypsies who year after year had their inventions to Macondo. Ursula runs immediately in the footsteps of his son; When José Arcadio Buendía (father) warns the absence of his wife, it brings together a group of men and they depart in pursuit of Ursula:
Indigenous fishermen, whose language is unknown, showed them sign at dawn that they had seen happen to anyone. Among the great innovations that different groups of Gypsies brought to Macondo, appeared the ice as the greatest invention of our time. The macondinos paid five Reals to touch it and feel to the sacred.
The history of Macondo in some manuscripts is an object of study; We see it clearly in the hard work of decipherment conducted Aureliano Babilonia. Aureliano occupied all of your tomorrows in deciphering the scrolls; He had become a man castellated written actually
Ursula expressed ever to Arcadio José: instead of walking thinking your crazy novelerias, you must take care of your children - replied. Watch them how they are, abandoned to the good of God, just like donkeys. José Arcadio Buendía took the words of his wife at the bottom of the letter. He looked through the window and saw two barefoot children in the sunny garden, and had the impression that only at that moment had begun to exist, conceived by the spell of Ursula.
José Arcadio Buendía, absorbed by the inventions of the Gypsies and fascinated by them thereby, become experimenter, had forgotten the reality that surrounded it. It was only for their inventions. He had even stopped dealing with their children; in a way, they had ceased to exist for him. The spell of Ursula is the expression used by the narrator as a synonym for "words of Ursula"; from these, the moment in which they are pronounced, children begin to exist for her father.
In the history of the family Buendia is interesting to note the explanation the genealogy of the names. In the long history of the family, the stubborn repetition of names had enabled him to draw conclusions that seemed strict to him. While the Aurelian were withdrawn, but lucid mindset, the José Arcadio were impulsive and entrepreneurs, but they were marked by a tragic sign. The history of the Buendía family is a history of repetitions. The name Aureliano and José Arcadio repeatedly speak of the eternal return. The characters, designated with the names of others, acquire traits of personality of his predecessors. This grouping by class (the Aurelian and the Arcadians) defines the nature of the characters and marks their destinies.
When Aureliano, the first human being who was born in Macondo, was three years old, went to the kitchen and surprised his mother saying:
is it going to fall. The pot was well placed in the center of the table, but as soon as the announcement was made by the child started an irrevocable irregular movement toward the edge, as driven by an inner dynamism, and it shattered on the floor. The harbinger of Aurelian did not stay in the words; within the plane of the real imagination also appear episodes in which clearly the Word determines reality.
Here are the omens of Aureliano which become facts. Other prophetic words of Aureliano constitute important episodes Center.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía, after eight months of having party, wrote to his mother Úrsula. Inside the sealed envelope that sent him through an emissary, had a paper written with a precious calligraphy that said: much care for Dad because he is going to die. Then they entered the room of José Arcadio Buendía, they shook it with all his strength, they shouted in the ear, they put a mirror in front of the nostrils, but could not wake him.
The plague of insomnia and oblivion. The macondinos had contracted this disease; even children remained awake without power, like the rest of the inhabitants of the village, to sleep in any way. Later no one returned to worrying about the useless habit of sleep.
[...] the most feared disease of insomnia was not the inability to sleep, because the body did not feel any fatigue, but their inexorable evolution towards a more critical manifestation: Oblivion [...] began to be erased from his memory the childhood memories, then the name and the notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the consciousness of their own beingto sink into a kind of idiocy without a past.
Aurelian was who discovered the formula that would defend them from evasions of memory: mark everything with his name was how not to forget the reality. Inked swab marked every thing with your name: table, Chair, clock, door, wall, bed pan. It was to corral and marked animals and plants: cow, goat, pork, chicken, cassava, taro, banana.
Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of oblivion, he realized that there could come a day that recognized the things by their inscriptions, but its utility is not remembered. The sign that hung in the cervix of the cow was an exemplary sign of the way in which Macondo residents were willing to fight against oblivion: this is the cow, have to milk it every morning to produce milk and milk must boil it to mix it with coffee and coffee with milk.
Thus they continued to live in an elusive reality , momentarily captured by words, but which had elope without remedy when they forget the values of the written word.
There is between cartels that had invaded Macondo, one said Dios. Everything that could be captured by the words immediately became a reality. Verification of its existence was the possibility to be expressed by the language. This episode, whose origin is the arrival in the town of visitation, a guajira Indian, and of his brother, who were fleeing a plague of insomnia that flagelaba to his tribe for several years, Macondo transformed during the time it lasted the plague. The first who manifested symptoms of the disease was Rebecca, with her: eyes lighting like a cat in the dark.
This is one of the most significant in terms of the relationship between words and things. The loss of the word is the loss of memory and the past.
The plague of oblivion introduces us to a storyteller that front the event emphasizes the idea of a close dependence of reality with respect to language; the idea that the things and its utilities are represented by words that name them appears in all its glory, is taken to the extreme.

The miraculous:

Tired of preaching in the desert, the father Nicanor [...]. She begged so much that it lost the voice [...]. He sang the Gospel voice lacerated by the appeal. The boy who had helped mass brought him a cup of thick and smoky chocolate which he took without breathing. The lips with a tissue which pulled out of the sleeve, extended arms and closed his eyes is then cleaned. Then the father Nicanor towered twelve inches above the ground level. It was a compelling resource.

The mythical legendary

García Márquez appropriates fictional realities present in other literary texts; These are absorbed by one hundred years of solitude. Mitico-legendarias realities that were the subject of several literatures are also here the novelistic of the Colombian author.
As the story unfolds, Melquiades is sitting in the corner, sitting at the desk, scrawling undecipherable signs; Since the beginning of the novel we can discover that Melquiades is the narrator of the story, you are building it from the word. The Gypsy spent hours and hours scrawling her enigmatic literature. Melquíades is one be prodigious who claimed to possess the keys of Nostradamus; This reference to the character, the power of his prophetic Word is highlighted. Melquiades had a look that seemed to know the other side of things.
What the inhabitants of Macondo? Insofar as the characters do not decode the manuscripts of Melquiades, may not know their identity (species sentenced to live a hundred years in solitude) or its final destination (the destruction). Aureliano second was given the task of deciphering the manuscripts of Melquiades; but it was impossible. The letters seemed clothes to dry on a wire, and resembled more to music writing which the literary. In one of their working hours, Aureliano second felt that he was not alone in the room. There was Melquiades; Since that time were almost every afternoon. With respect to manuscripts, it explained that no one must know its sense as they have not fulfilled one hundred years.
Aureliano Babilonia, who Yes could eventually translate the scrolls, locked in their task of deciphering the manuscripts, with an emergence of Melquiades told him this had already discovered in what language they were written: in Sanskrit. Aurelian had time to learn Sanskrit in the years missing parchments fulfilled a century and they could be deciphered.
Aureliano Babilonia, become sang, occupied his time in learning Sanskrit to arrive on time with the translation. After three years since Santa Sofía de la Piedad will take grammar, he translated the first statement. But it still needed to understand those encrypted verses. There was a wonderful moment where he found the scroll keys under the heading that said: the first of the lineage is moored on a tree and the last ants are eating it. He thus understood that those manuscripts was deciphering understood the history of the family, written by Melquíades even in its most mundane details, one hundred years in advance. In the denouement of the novel revealed the identity of the Narrator: Melquiades.
The history of Macondo was written, the words preexistieron to the Foundation, development and destruction of the village. Aureliano Babilonia knew that his destiny was written:
[...] began to decipher the moment that was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the Act of decoding the last page of the scrolls, as if he were seeing in a spoken mirror.
[...] before reaching the final verse already had understood that not it would be ever of that room, as it was planned that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be ravaged by the wind and banished the memory of the men at the moment when Aureliano Babilonia ended to decipher the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since always and forever", because the strains sentenced to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on Earth".


García Márquez, Gabriel (1928 -), writer, journalist and prize Colombian Nobel. He was born in Aracataca and was formed initially in the field of journalism. He was the editor of El Universal, a newspaper in Cartagena during 1946, El Heraldo in Barranquilla between 1948 and 1952, and El Espectador in Bogota from 1952. His best-known novels are one hundred years of solitude (1967), which recounts in epic tone of a Colombian family history, and in which the stylistic influences of the American novelist William Faulkner, and the autumn of the Patriarch (1975), political power and corruption can be tracked.
Chronicle of a death foretold (1981) is the story of a murder in a small Latin American city, love in the time of cholera (1985) is a love story that develops also in Latin America. The general in his Labyrinth (1989), on the other hand, is a fictional account of the last days of the revolutionary and statesman Simón Bolívar. It is also author of several books of short stories such as the incredible and sad history Eréndira and her grandmother to the heartless (1972) or strange pilgrims (1992). Garcia Marquez has aroused admiration in many Western countries by the very personal mixture of reality and fantasy that takes place in his narrative works, always located at Macondo, an imaginary city in its country. His last published work, news of a kidnapping (1996), is a fictionalized on Colombian narco-terrorism report. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 and he was formally invited by the Colombian Government to return to their country, where served as an intermediary between the Government and the guerrillas at the beginning of the Decade of the eighties.

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