Hi everyone! Hope this week is starting off well with warmer weather and more sunshine! 🙂

To start off my blog, I can say that the second half of the book was fairly interesting, maybe more interesting than the first, I would argue. A lot has definitely unfolded, a lot has changed, and has come and gone, but the idea of solitude and loneliness is still tied to the town of Macondo and its inhabitants. The magic that the town once possessed has vanished into thin air, bringing in despair, aggression, and grief in return.

The events happening in the book still seemed repetitive and cyclical to me, just varying in gravity and magnitude. Things start to get more chaotic with the war and having more people enter the once-secluded town.  Last Thursday, we were talking about technology and how it manifests in this book, and while reading the second half, I was thinking of how war and the strikes of the workers are also forms of technology if defined as something that is being channeled energy into, and in this case, I see it as the workers exerting energy into what they think is just, and people in power are exerting energy into showing more power and ending them all with guns just because they can. This situation is unfortunately still evident in different places around the world, so I don’t know if I would already consider it history myself.

And then afterward, more chaos unfolds between the members of the family and of the town of Macondo. The rest of the story revolves around love, incest, and then the characters dying off one by one.

I highly agree with what Professor Jon said that this book is about repetition, and that no matter how much you want to escape the past, it will still haunt you. I know that in the beginning, Ursula was afraid to marry Jose Arcadio Buendia and bear a child with a pig’s tail due to practicing incest, and now it has happened, bringing the story to a close.

Sooner than later, Macondo is erased from existence by a hurricane, as if it had never existed.

My question, or probably just a personal thought, is that the presence of the rocking chair seems to be there all throughout the book. I relate it to solitude and loneliness since it’s usually a symbol of being old, or sitting down and having a though or two, and no two people can be on it at the same time (unless maybe it’s someone holding an infant). Do you think there was any symbolism or relation of it to the story?