Week 7 – Garcia Marquez
by kenwardt
I quite enjoyed reading the first half of 100 Years of Solitude during my reading break. I found it to be an easier read than some of the previous novels we have dived into, except for the fact that the family tree at the beginning was not much help in understanding who the characters were, as there were some characters with the same names! Zoning out was not an option for this novel.
Just like others have mentioned, this novel contained some disturbing qualities; incest, and pedophilia to name a couple. At times I found it hard to follow, and it was a prevalent occurrence throughout the novel. I tried to focus on other themes of the novel, such as the repetitiveness of words and wordplay.
Something that stood out to me while reading the novel was the amount of times i saw the words “no one.”
“… no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died” (p. 11).
“…. to head toward the land that no one had promised them” (p. 24).
“…. so that she (Rebeca) could eat when no one was looking” (p. 42).
*I’m reading from an e-text so the page numbers may be janky.*
I found it related to the overall theme of the novel of loneliness and isolation, as depicted in the title of the novel. This was very important and prominent throughout the novel , as Macondo is a town that is quite isolated. Due to Macondo’s distance from other places, you would think that family members of Macondo would stick close to one another, as often times they only had each other, but that was not the case for José Arcadio Buendía. “José Arcadio Buendía spent the long months of the rainy season shut up in a small room that he had built in the rear of the house so that no one would disturb his experiments” (p.5). José isolated and alienated himself from his family in search of new knowledge. José spent most of his life pent up in his laboratory, and distanced himself from his wife and two sons. This obsession of new knowledge reminds me of mad scientists that go cuckoo over their life’s work.
What an interesting first half of 100 Years of Solitude. I am looking forward to the second half, and my question to you all is: were there any other key words that you saw repeated throughout the novel? If so, how do you think these words affected the themes of the novel?
It is true that the very title of the novel gives us clues about the character of these characters, and the unique characteristics of a town like Macondo. But even so, I find it interesting to follow in the plot the personal encounters between family members and the variety of affections that promote these encounters, their mutations and contradictions. Regarding the founder of the town, it has always seemed to me that there is a quixotic aspect in his way of acting, don’t you think?
Hi!
Yes, I also noticed the theme of isolation. Especially when someone died, and the whole house would go into mourning. The isolation, loneliness, and solitude are definitely present throughout the novel’s first half. However, I didn’t catch onto this keyword of ‘no one’. I remember it being mentioned quite a few times that no one had died in their town yet, and Úrsula was willing to die for the town, which stood out to me. Still, this reputation of no one is an interesting observation. I don’t think I observed repetition with words the same way I did with their names.
Hey, cool blog post! I like how you used a technique that we learned in class a couple weeks ago to further dive into the story. I agree that isolation was a pretty common scenario in the book, and I also didn’t expect that for a character such as José Arcadio Buendía, isolation was to be locked up in a room in an already isolated town. However, I didn’t really find any “keywords” such as ‘no one’ that were used repetitively as I didn’t think to dissect the story that way.