One Hundred Years Of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Lonely, Good Company of Books by Richard Rodriguez is an excerpt from HUNGER OF MEMORY: THE EDUCATION OF RICHARD RODRIGUEZ by Richard Rodriguez. The Lonely, Good Company of Books was published in 1982. Rodriguez is a Hispanic from San Francisco, California. He struggled with learning to read in English even though both of his parents spoke English and Spanish. Throughout the whole excerpt, Rodriguez talks about his struggles and his efforts in reading books that were tough. He criticizes the school system in the way that it does not help students with reading.

Adam within the Book of Genesis is depicted as a man who cares deeply for the paradise he has been granted by god and aims to maintain the gift he was endowed. Jose himself takes responsibility to make sure that the village he creates is one that thrives and remains for many years to come. Both display respect towards the gift they have been given as well the responsibility to maintain it. Although the intentions of both Jose and Adam are pure of heart towards the creation of their paradises they both eventually fall victim to their own devices, a subject that will discussed in the subsequent paragraph.

When we think about society there is often a stark contrast between the controversy projected in our media about the issues that our society faces and the mellow, safe view we have of our own smaller, more tangible ‘local’ society. This leads us to believe that our way of life is protected and our rights secured by that concept of society that has been fabricated and built upon during the course of our short lives. However, what if society were not what we perceive it to be, and the government chose to exercise its power in an oppressive manner? As a society we would like to think that we ourselves are above such cruelty, yet as The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera recounts the state of Cuba in the 1990’s so must we remember that all societies and governments view the individual differently as opposed to the whole. Each group has unique expectations that are enforced upon the individual goes beyond those expectations. The individual can very quickly find their rose glasses view of their society cracking before their very eyes as the reality of taking such a rise comes into view.

In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the author uses allegory (often misinterpreted by readers) to show the dangers of mass media consumption and the decline of reading traditional media. Many readers draw incorrect conclusions (lessons learned) from the book due to how generally the book applies its theme. Government censorship, though an important topic, is not the intended focus of the novel Fahrenheit 451. Finally, Bradbury’s original message of the book shows the beauty of traditional media and the dangers of consuming primarily packaged mass media (such as television and radio). In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury used events that were pertinent to the time to try and convey the message he originally intended. While this message has been lost to many, that does not lessen the work’s value as a piece of literature. Going forward this paper will explore the conclusions normally reached by readers, as well as exploring the authors own original intentions for the work. The primary theme taken from the book is from the author’s chosen setting, being of an authoritarian regime in which books are illegal. While this theme is very easy to grasp (as the reader is figuratively bludgeoned over the head with it), it isn’t the only one people have taken away from the book, nor was it the authors intended focus. Another theme that many readers (normally graduate readers from my research) have identified with are the Christian symbols in the book. While these are used, in some cases

Characters are made to present certain ideas that the author believes in. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold there are many characters included that range from bold, boisterous characters to minuscule, quiet characters but one thing they all have in common is that they all represent ideas. Characters in the novel convey aspects of Marquez’s Colombian culture.

One of the points that is consistently brought up in Toni Morrison’s Paradise is that of the all black town “Ruby”. Paradise uses the setting of Oklahoma to discuss how many black towns are shaped by past history and religion. While the town in this novel is fictional, there have been real all black towns in the United States, and it seems that these towns influenced many aspects of the town Ruby, which is why it is so easy to imagine that the story could actually be real. Many authors have written in general about the novel, and specifically about the town within it.

The Solitude of Self is a speech that was given by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. This speech mainly discussed gender equality in every situation, including education and suffrage. Stanton clearly was opposed to the idea of inequality and believed that every person, man or woman, deserved to have the same rights.

The death of Prudencio Aguilar, a boastful man who claimed that the “‘rooster of [Jose] can do [Ursula] a favor,’” at the hands of Jose serves as the first parallel to religion in One Hundred Years of Solitude (21). The events that follow “[Jose] killing his neighbor, Prudencio Aguilar, a murder mirroring the first murder in the Bible, the founders of a new world civilization stop in Macondo because Jose Arcadio Buendia, like Cain before him, who was a founder of cities had dreamed of a great city” (Saldivar 33). Jose, like Cain, dreams of something greater than Riohacha; he dreams of “a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up” and the city’s name “had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo” (Marquez 24). Moreover, “there are

   One Hundred Year of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez projects itself among the most famous and ambitious works in the history of literature. Epic in scope, Marquez weaves autobiography, allegory and historical allusion to create a surprisingly coherent story line about his forebears, his descendants and ours.

In the novel, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Meursault the protagonist, becomes drawn into a “senseless” murder that has to face the absurdity of life and because of his actions, Meursault is presented as a danger due to his lack of “morality” to society. Meursault who is not able to take control of his life but respond to what life offers him believes in the simplicity of life. He tries to understand the living through logic and objectivity, which ultimately turns futile, as he himself cannot maintain proper control over his thoughts and emotions. From the interactions between Marie, to the murder of the Arab, and the meeting with the Chaplain, Meursault overcomes his indifferent views to form an opinion about what life really means. The central theme presented by Camus is how the threat of mortality becomes a catalyst for understanding the significance of life.

Location also tells us that it is economically and socially underdeveloped, and is reinforced with the image of isolation given to us when Garcia Marquez writes of Father Gonzaga having to write and send a letter to the bishop. The time period of the story is established as modern day when it is written “…in determining the difference between a hawk and an airplane…(Garcia Marquez 442).” The town’s people are portrayed as simple, primitive and crude as demonstrated when Garcia Marquez writes  “…they did not have the heart to club him to death.” and then instead Pelayo “…dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop (441).” After the child’s fever breaks Pelayo and Elisenda “felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas (441).”

Imagine being alone all your life and dying without being remembered. That was a bad way to explain One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, as he illustrates the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and the town of Macondo that is isolated from the rest of the world and its founder, José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Úrsula Iguarán. Throughout the family tree, many fortunes and misfortunes occurred which soon led it to the familyś downfall because of the major theme of death plaguing them. For instance, the death of the town of Macondo and Aureliano, the last member of the Buendía family, ties in the facts that the wipe out of the Buendía’s and the existence of Macondo stops the cycle of death being forgotten by the living and how solitude affect death making it illuminate the meaning of One Hundred Years of Solitude as a whole.

A copy of García Márquez's Nobel Prize lecture, "The Solitude of Latin America," delivered on December 8, 1982.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has dealt with historical themes in several of his fictions, but in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the author makes a statement about history and the importance of historical consciousness. In this paper, the view of history expressed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude will be the focus.

Garcia Marquez has said that "One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a history of Latin America, it is a metaphor for Latin America" (Dreifus 1983:1974). The historical themes include conquest and colonization, settlement and scientific discovery, civil wars, foreign economic intervention, technological change, and finally the decay and disappearance of a long-established way of life.