As I reached the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was struck by the uncanny resemblance between the novel and Borges’ labyrinthine short stories. The themes of repetition and cyclicity that permeate both texts were whimsically portrayed through the seemingly never-ending, similar fates of Aurelianos and José Arcadios, as well as the inevitable doom of the town of Macondo, where everything ultimately ended up back where it started, as depicted in the novel’s conclusion. It was as though the story of the Buendía family had been stretched out with gradually increasing force on a spring, in terms of spatiality and proliferation, until García Márquez had expended all his energy, at which point he released the spring, returning it abruptly to its original position, bringing the novel to a close. This prophetic end of the story reminded me of Borges’ short stories, particularly The Circular Ruins and The Library of Babel, where the cyclic nature of fate was depicted in a similarly haunting manner, as well as the resemblance of Melquíades’ manuscript to the nearly-indecipherable books in the library.
However, it was not just the cyclical nature of time that fascinated me; García Márquez’s portrayal of historicity through the massacre at the train station of Macondo also struck a chord. The only survivor of the massacre, José Arcadio Segundo, told a version of events that was deemed absurd by the inhabitants of Macondo, who accepted the government’s official version of history, where “there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families” (309). This could be seen as a metaphorical event, reflecting the often silenced voice of the “loser” in history, a theme we had discussed in class during the week of Cartucho by Nellie Campobello.
As the novel drew to a close, I found myself pondering upon the fundamental question of whether the fate of the Buendía family was predetermined. Throughout the book, the Buendía family operates according to traditions passed down for generations, and impulsive decisions or acts that confront these traditions often lead the characters back to the same point, creating a sense of futility in breaking out of their predetermined fates, as evident in the experience of Colonel Aureliano Buendía who had fought for years only to return to his laboratory later and spent the rest of his life there as he did in his young age. It is as though the Buendía family is trapped in a cycle of love and loss, unable to escape their destiny.
Ultimately, the novel left me with a sense of futility and inevitability, as the Buendía family is trapped in a cycle of love and loss from which they cannot escape, as hinted at a few times in the second half of the book.
Question: Do you believe that the cyclical nature of time and predetermined fate portrayed in One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the reality of human existence? Do our innate desires for never-ending advancement (e.g. AI) foretell our predetermined destiny, one that may ultimately lead us towards catastrophe, or do we have the agency to break free from the cycle?