One Hundred Years of Solitude

The most instantly striking thing in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez manipulates the setting. The location shifts are not thus far completely out of the ordinary, but Marquez specifically manipulates the setting heavily in terms of time. This shift reinforces the magical realism in the novel by destabilizing the reader’s sense of reality.

One the very first page, two settings occur simultaneously: Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces a firing squad, and the reader is taken back in time to his childhood in Macando. The little village is initially described as peaceful, even Eden-like. This contrasts with the impending doom that the reader knows awaits one of the characters. The first section of the book is filled with little hints at foreshadowing like this. For example, on page five Melquiades gives Jose Arcadio Buendia the laboratory of an alchemist that “was to have a profound influence on the future of the village”.  The reader does not know yet what that profound influence will be exactly, but the foreshadowing puts the reader on alert for connections in the succeeding pages.

Another detail that caught my eye is the way Jose Arcadio Buendia interacts with his sons. He ignores them for a great deal of the first section, with certain notable exceptions. In the first chapter, he suddenly has a moment of clarity in which he feels that his children have begun to exist for him. That moment is followed by a burst of interaction between Jose Arcadio Buendia and his sons, during which he teaches them to be literate. He also teaches them his ideas about the world, some of which are only loosely based in fact. This situation, like Marquez’s technique of shifting time periods, reinforces the idea that reality is not perceived in one reliable manner. Rather, reality depends upon the perceiver and the situation in which it is perceived.