After finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was left amazed at how much Garcia Marquez was able to fit into the novel.  Not only where there seven generations packed into this book, but each generation had meaning and characterization, and there was plot points surrounding all the characters we meant. Of course, the importance of characters varied, but never before have I read something that covered so many members of a family across a timeline like this.

One thing that stuck out to me while reading the second part of the novel was the number of parallels and call backs we got the events in the first half. One thing I noticed was the idea of newcomers arriving in Macondo bringing trouble upon the Buendia family. At the start of the novel, the gypsies arrive with what is considered “new technologies” and during the second half of the novel we see the arrival of the train marking the start of the downfall of Macondo overall. The idea that outsiders bring trouble can be seen throughout the novel in other examples too, such as the revolutionaries.

Another call back that caught my eye, and perhaps was meant to be quite obvious, was when Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula had a child together born with the tail of a pig, which was exactly what Ursula’s fear was at the start of the novel with her husband Jose Arcadio Buendia. These call backs speak to themes of chance and destiny, as it seems that it was always meant to be that Macondo would have a downfall, and that an incest relationship would result to a child with deformities.

There is also themes surrounding the advancement of technology and the negative impacts this can have on society. In the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the arrival of technology is the downfall of society. Once Macondo is opened to the outside world, it appears as though it was doomed from that moment on. Looking at the novel as a whole, it almost would seem that the Buendia family was destined from the start to tragedy and downfall, and that their peaceful home of Macondo was never meant to last.

My question for this week is similar to my one last week, which was do you believe the Buendia family is cursed due to Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendia’s relationship? Working off that, what do you think the turning point for the Buendia’s was, when everything truly started to fall apart for the family? Do you think one incident played into isolation and tragedy that ended up plaguing members of the family?