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Buendias

Decent Essays

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez truly creates a magical universe. Rooting in the isolated village of Macondo in rural Latin America, generations of Buendias live with each having unique relation to this universe. The story is largely realistic and historical, in that many historical and cultural events play roles in the characters’ development; it is also greatly magical and imaginative as many moments are scientifically impossible and dreamily symbolical. Macondo in many ways parallels our real world, and the Buendias in this sense epitomizes the entire human being. Ultimately, the birth of the last Aureliano, who has monstrous appearance and is eaten by ants, symbolizes Marquez’s pessimistic view on the future of human being …show more content…

Even though he comes on the stage at the same time period as the first generations, his presence greatly influences the people of Macondo: he introduces science and technology from overseas, heals the Macondoans from insomnia, and, most importantly, prophesizes Macondo’s fate. Melquiades is definitely the most significant epitome of magical realism in the story: people of the isolated Macondo improve their understanding of the world through him in many ways; but his immortality and clairvoyance give Macondo’s universe a lot of magic. Even though he tells the people that the earth is round and magnet can attract metal, Melquiades himself incredibly resurrects from death. “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.” (49) Melquiades’s influence on Macondo is also profoundly spiritual, especially through the introduction of ice. For Jose Arcadio Buendia, he envisions the future Macondo made of ice; for Colonel Aureliano, ice serves as a timelessly emotional bond to home and family as he faces the firing squad; for Aureliano Segundo, ice-making becomes a business. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” (1) The grand opening sentence of the book has such a plain and indifferent tone, but it contains the information that transcends text and …show more content…

In the very beginning, Melquiades’s parchment has decided the fate of the Buendias. As the tragic end of Macondo looms closer and closer, the ironies get less and less subtle. The end of Macondo is not just that it gets destroyed by the tornado, but is the result of detached family bonding and the dissolution of morality. As Macondo epitomizes the world we live in and the Buendias the humanity, the story forces the readers to examine the relationship between people and their settings. The monstrous Aureliano certainly poses a shocking revelation: it is a product of incest, lust and loss of family bonding, but on a larger scale it symbolizes the consequence of sins and immorality. In this sense, this story ultimately serves to admonish the inevitability of decay if human being do not seek improvement just like the result of the magical and ironical

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