One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

First published:Cien años de soledad, 1967 (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of plot: 1820’s to 1920’s

Locale: Macondo, a town in Latin America

Principal Characters

  • José Arcadio Buendía, the Buendía family patriarch and founder of Macondo
  • Úrsula Iguarán, the Buendía family matriarch and wife of José
  • Melquíades, a gypsy
  • Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the younger son of José and Úrsula
  • José Arcadio Buendía, the older son of José and Úrsula
  • Amaranta, the daughter of José and Úrsula
  • Rebeca, the adopted daughter of José and Úrsula
  • Pietro Crespi, suitor to both Rebeca and Amaranta
  • Aureliano Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo, twin great-grandchildren of José and Úrsula
  • Remedios the Beauty, sister of the twins
  • Aureliano, a sixth-generation Buendía who deciphers family history and is the father of the last Buendía
  • Aureliano, the last Buendía, born with a pig’s tail

The Story

Standing before a firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembers the day that his father, José Arcadio Buendía, had taken him to see ice for the first time. This had taken place in the early years of Macondo, the town that the elder Buendía, his wife Úrsula, and others had founded after José Arcadio and Úrsula had sought to escape the ghost of a man who José Arcadio had killed. The dead man had accused José Arcadio of impotence, when the real reason that the Buendías had avoided sex for so long after marriage was that they were afraid of producing a child with a pig’s tail, something that had already happened between their two “inbred” families.

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Soon after the founding of Macondo, gypsies begin to visit the town with incredible inventions, the wonder of which ignites the scientific curiosity of José Arcadio. Through these visits the Buendías meet Melquíades, a wise and magical gypsy and author of a mysterious manuscript. On one particular visit by the gypsies, right after the town learns of Melquíades’s death in a far-off land, José Arcadio Buendía and his sons are introduced to ice, which the elder Buendía calls “the great invention of our time.”

José Arcadio and Úrsula Buendía have two sons, Aureliano and José Arcadio, and two daughters, Amaranta and Rebeca, the latter of whom they had adopted after she had shown up on their doorstep, orphaned and with her parents’ bones in a canvas sack. The two sons both father illegitimate children by Pilar Ternera, and the older son, José Arcadio, soon runs off with the gypsies. An insomnia plague attacks the town and brings with it a temporary but severe loss of memory. Melquíades, who has died “but could not bear the solitude,” returns to Macondo. A conservative magistrate, the peaceful town’s first, settles in shortly thereafter.

An Italian dance teacher, Pietro Crespi, arrives to tune the pianola and to teach the Buendía girls the latest steps. He begins to court Rebeca, which touches off a lifelong jealousy and bitterness in Amaranta. Meanwhile, Melquíades continues to be a presence (as would his manuscript) in the Buendía house. José Arcadio (the elder) attempts to photograph God, begins having visits from the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar (the man he killed years before), starts speaking a strange language (later identified as Latin), and is tethered to a chestnut tree in the backyard. Aureliano falls in love with and marries Remedios, the magistrate’s barely pubescent daughter, who dies, pregnant with twins, just days before Rebeca’s scheduled marriage to Pietro Crespi.

José Arcadio (the son) returns, enormous and tattooed, and marries his adopted sister (Rebeca), and Pietro Crespi turns his affections to Amaranta. Aureliano becomes Colonel Aureliano Buendía and leads an uprising against the conservatives. He leads thirty-two uprisings and all end in failure before an embittered Aureliano returns home to live out his days making little fish of gold, melting them down, and making them again, over and over. He also fathers seventeen illegitimate sons with seventeen different women. While Aureliano is off fighting the government, Amaranta rejects Pietro Crespi, who then commits suicide. Brother José Arcadio is killed mysteriously, his blood flowing in a stream from his house across town to the Buendía house, José Arcadio (the father) dies, initiating a rain of yellow flowers from the sky, and Arcadio (José Arcadio’s illegitimate son) becomes the town dictator and is executed. This is not before, however, he and wife Santa Sofía de la Piedad have three children: twin sons Aureliano Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo (whose identities are accidentally switched), and one daughter, Remedios the Beauty.

Aureliano Segundo spends most of his time with Petra Cotes, but he marries Fernanda del Carpio, who will never quite fit in with the Buendías. Aureliano Segundo has three children with Fernadna del Capio: José Arcadio, who is sent to seminary in Rome; Renata Remedios, or Meme, who has an illegitimate child by auto mechanic Mauricio Babilonia, who is always accompanied by a swarm of yellow butterflies; and Amaranta Úrsula, who is sent to school in Belgium. Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s seventeen bastard sons suddenly show up in Macondo. One of them, Aureliano Triste, eventually brings a train to town, and with it comes inventions every bit as wondrous as those the gypsies had brought years before: electric light bulbs, moving pictures, and phonographs.

The intrusion from the outside world also brings something else: a North American banana company. Meanwhile, Remedios the Beauty, whose physical perfection drives men mad, ascends to heaven while hanging laundry on the line. Soon thereafter, sixteen of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s illegitimate sons are hunted down and killed; the seventeenth was killed later. Amaranta begins sewing her own shroud, soon after which Colonel Aureliano Buendía dies. Amaranta continues to sew her shroud with the intention of dying on the day that she finishes it, which she does. It was at this time that Meme has Mauricio Babilonia’s illegitimate son (Aureliano).

Relations between the banana company and Macondo gradually worsen, and soon there is a strike. José Arcadio Segundo, now a union leader, is in a crowd of demonstrators when army soldiers fire and kill three thousand people. José Arcadio Segundo is not killed but is unable thereafter to find anyone else who will say that the massacre occurred. Officially at least, the massacre simply did not happen.

A continuous five-year rainstorm follows. Úrsula, now well over one hundred years old, dies, as does Rebeca, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Santa Sofía soon moves out and Fernanda dies as well. Meanwhile, Aureliano (son of Meme and Mauricio Babilonia) becomes obsessed with Melquíades’s mysterious manuscript. José Arcadio returns home from Rome and opens the house to children he picks up, some of whom come back later, murder him, and make off with a stash of gold.

Amaranta Úrsula returns from Belgium with her husband and soon engages in an incestuous relationship with her nephew, Aureliano. Their child is born with a pig’s tail. Amaranta Úrsula dies, and the baby is eaten by an army of ants. Suddenly, Melquíades’s mysterious manuscript becomes clear to Aureliano. The manuscript contains the history of Macondo and the Buendías, written before it actually happened, and that history will be complete, with Aureliano’s death and the destruction of Macondo, as soon as Aureliano finishes deciphering the manuscript.

Bibliography

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Corwin, Jay. "One Hundred Years of Solitude, Indigenous Myth, and Meaning." Confluencia 26.2 (2011): 61–71. Print.

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