I think the latter half of One Hundred Years of Solitude is its best: when the utopian sheen of Macondo begins to wear off and fade rapidly, revealing a deeply flawed and potentially doomed town at its surface. Here the major themes of the novel become apparent, including some commentary on the nature of human civilization. Macondo, like many towns in the Americas of its time, was founded upon the expectation that its settlers would build themselves a better life from the ground up. One hundred years later, it becomes clear that this is not true of at least the descendants of the initial settlers, who find themselves relegated to disaster. The novel ends with the destruction of Macondo, its memory wiped from history.

The tension between the desire for innovative change and relapses to old, ill-advised ways is introduced with the origin story of Macondo. Its founder, José Arcadio Buendía, establishes the town after murdering Prudencio Aguilar and fleeing. José Arcadio Buendía is haunted by the image of Prudencio for the rest of his life. It would be appropriate to observe, then, that Macondo was cursed from the start.

José Arcadio Buendía acknowledges how difficult it is to erase the stain of old mistakes and start afresh by calling Macondo “a city of mirrors” reflective of the society and people that surround it. Macondo is only as good as its residents- who inevitably turn out to be just like their ancestors. Recurring behaviours across generations continually hold the town back from progression. Although signs of modernity arrive like the train or agricultural development, the habits of the Buendía family remain. As mentioned in the lecture, the characters of One Hundred Years of Soliltude are repeatedly given opportunities to change- but they never do. In the final pages of the book, Amaranta Úrsula considers naming her son a unique name after generations of Aurelianos and José Arcadios, only to be overwritten by her husband. The natural impulse here is to think “well, what if she went ahead with calling the child Rodrigo”?, but I think of that outcome as an impossibility.

The characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude do not have free will. What I mean by this is that they are simply unable to deviate from the behaviours of their ancestors. It is prescribed in their DNA, so to speak, that they innately repeat the mistakes of the past. What delivered this unfortunate, inflexible situation? One can place the blame on José Arcadio Buendía’s curse, but I would more generally shift it to the founding of Macondo itself. Readers may deny a similar ancestral pattern in their own family- after all, massive technological and social innovations part generations- but this defensiveness is not what García Márquez wants us to consider. The appeal of One Hundred Years of Solitude is based on its mirror-like reflection of universal human behaviour. We may think that we are approaching utopia, but age-old human habits- greed, dishonesty, envy- will always pervade.

Do you agree with my interpretation of the free will of the characters? Do you think there could have been a possibility for a Buendía to break the generational cycle? Are we just as flawed as the characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude?