The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendia, is impulsive and inquisitive. He remains a leader who is also deeply solitary, alienating himself from other men in his obsessive investigations into mysterious matters. We are surprised to learn that he and his wife, Ursula, are cousins. Children of incest were said to have terrible genetic defects and there was precedent for this: two of their relatives gave birth to a child with a pig’s tail. Luckily, their children are sturdy. The character traits of Jose Arcadio Buendia are inherited by his descendents throughout the novel. His older child, Jose Arcadio, inherits his immense physical strength and his impetuousness. His younger child, Aureliano (later renamed Colonel Aureliano Buendia), inherits his intense, enigmatic focus.
Gradually, the village loses its innocent, solitary state when it establishes contact with other towns in the region. Civil war breaks out in the land, and Macondo soon takes a role in the war, sending a militia led by Colonel Aureliano Buendia to fight against the Conservative regime. Macondo changes from a peaceful, magical, and sheltered place to a town irrevocably connected to the outside world through the eminence of the Colonel. While the Colonel is gone, Jose Arcadio goes insane and must be tied to a tree until he dies. Arcadio, his illegimate grandchild, takes leadership of the town but soon becomes a brutal dictator. The Conservative capture the town later, and Arcadio is shot by a firing squad.
The war continues until Colonal Aureliano, weary of the meaningless fighting, arranges a peace treaty that will last until the end of the novel. After the treaty was signed, Aureliano shoots himself in the chest, but miraculously survives. He is the hero for a while, but by the end of the novel, no one remembers who he is. Streets are named after him, but the citizens think that he is just a myth. Eventually, he passes away silently.
After the war, the town develops into a sprawling centre of activity as foreigners arrive by thousands. They begin a banana plantation near Macondo. The town prospers until a strike arises there. The national army is summoned to gun down the protesting workers, who are later dumped into the ocean. This is Macondo’s downfall. Ursula, the impossibly ancient widow of Jose Arcadio Buendia, remarks “it was as if time was going in a circle.” After the massacre, the town is saturated by heavy rain that lasts for four years. Ursula says that she is waiting for the rain to stop so that she can die at last. The last member of the Buendia line, named Aureliano, is born at this time. When the rain stops, Ursula dies at last.
Solitude pervades and permeates everything. More than a century goes by over the course of the book, and most of the events that Garcia Marquez describes are the major turning points in the lives of the Buendias: births, deaths, marriages, love affairs (often related to incest). Some of the Buendia men are wild and sexually rapacious, frequenting brothels and taking lovers. Others are quiet and solitary, preferring to shut themselves up in their rooms to make tiny golden fish or to pore over ancient manuscripts. The women, too, range from the outrageously outgoing, like Meme, who once brings home seventy-two friends from her boarding school, to her prim mother Fernanda del Carpio, who marries a man whom she never loves. Meanwhile, Ursula’s constant reference to the family myth of the pig’s tail keeps the reader in a sense of anticipation that the family myth will be fulfilled.
Aureliano is finally left in solitude at the deteriorating house, where he studies the parchments of Melquiades. Long after ‘death’ and burial, the ghost of Melquiades continues to be heard, shuffling through the rooms. Aureliano gives up on his task to have a love affair with his aunt, Amaranta Ursula, not knowing that they are related. The son of them comes out with a pig’s tail, and is carried off by gigantic ants, showing, as Ursula has said, time revolves in circles, which brings utter destruction to Macondo.
When Amaranta dies in childbirth, Aureliano is finally able to decipher the parchments. The house, together with the whole town, disintegrates into a whirlwind as he translates the parchments, on which the entire history of the Buendias is contained. The parchments say that the family and the house will be swept out of history as he finishes translating. So the fantastic story ends in the moment when obliteration eradicates the town. The mood by the end of the novel is fatalistic.
One Hundred Year of Solitude portrays how the society plays a role in a character’s demise into solitude. The characters in the story only seem mad and bewildered when they think they can change their destiny, or special events happen to them. The eminent Colonel dies when urinating in his backyard, alienated and alone. The most beautiful creature, Remedios the Beauty, ascends to heaven in waving folds of sheets mythically. The outgoing Meme is forced by her rigidly formal mother to leave her family because she has had a secret relationship with an auto mechanic. She never says a word again. Death requests Amaranta Buendia, the patriarch’s aging daughter, to make herself a shroud, and when she finishes her work, she will die peacefully. A sense of frantic desperation emerges in Amaranta and she believes that she can somehow delay her last day by prolonging her task. These are inevitable fates that one should accept, but one always avoids and refuses them. Yet, Amaranta Buendia does change her attitude towards life. On her final day, she embraces her fate. She freely chooses what will happen to her since she finally understands the inevitability of fate. It is she who leaves life, not Life who leaves her. She need not feel regretful.
As should be obvious, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that changes with reading: a second or third reading will be very different from the first. The multiple paths a reader takes through the novel provide a rich and complicated stew, one that can be savoured again and again.
This story also extends in meaning. Nowadays, people are always grumbling at their appearances, families, jobs and out of luck. However, realizing that we are incapable of doing many things and making much difference gives us strength and courage. Can we choose to be a boy or a girl? Can we choose to be a Chinese or an American? Can we choose somebody as our family members? Sure that the answers are “No”, we have to cherish our lives even more. You had it coming if you are too stubborn to accept the reality.
