The connection between Illness and Obsession as it pertains to Colonel Aureliano Buendia

In the first half of One Hundred Years of Solitude illnesses play a crucial role in developing several different plot lines, allowing Marquez to create parallels between passion, obsession and sickness and changes in identity. Early in the novel the town of Macondo is afflicted by a ‘plague of insomnia’ that also causes loss of memory so that “when the sick person [becomes] used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood begins to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being” (44). By establishing a connection between illness and obsession, Marquez explores his characters’ infatuations and how their raptures are supernatural in their ability to change them, making them, simultaneously, much greater and much smaller than they actually are.

            One of the strongest examples of this correlation surrounds the political turmoil that layers the first half of the novel. When “Liberal fever” (99) catches on in the schools in Macondo it is the ‘Liberal’ Colonel Aureliano Buendia who rationally recommends discretion and, after taking control of the town assures the local leader that when the war is over he will not be mistreated. He says to the old man that what he is doing is, “Not madness…War” (101). It feels reasonable that there could be a separation between war and madness because Colonel Aureliano seems so in control at this point of the book, as if he is about to become a sort of stoic hero. Yet in being at war so long Aureliano begins to lose his humanity. Aureliano has one of his friends who fights for the Conservatives put to death and says to him, “’Remember, old friend…I’m not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s shooting you’” (158), as if this absolves him of responsibility—as if it is no longer Aureliano who controls the revolution, but that the revolution has taken control of him. Eventually Aureliano, “lost in the solitude of his power, [begins] to lose direction,” (166) indicative of how the war has in fact warped him drastically. 

              Throughout the first half of the novel Colonel Aureliano is one of many strong examples of how mesmeric certain passions such as power are. Colonel Aureliano not only forgets his original ideologies but also forgets his empathy for, among others, his family: “in an instant he discovered the scratches, the welts, the sores, the ulcers and the scars that had been left on [his mother] by more than half a century of daily life, and he saw that those damages did not even arouse a feeling of pity in him” (173). As Colonel Aureliano loses sight of his original purpose for going to war he morphs in his identity, his ideals and his personality are ravaged, his memory changes, even as the labels on him stay the same: a liberal with conservative ideology, Aureliano, unrecognizable from who he used to be. It is not until he steps outside the bubbl