Today we kind of had a symposium. Feel free to add your thoughts or questions. Possible discussions. . . Repeating. . . repeating. . .repeating. . . Solitude (what types?) Love Progress Humanity/man’s treatment of man Melquiades’ manuscripts Hyperbole/extraordinary/magical Novel structure (Many years later. . .) Maconda as a setting Is this a Buendia story or a universal story? With which character to you most identify? Why? Religion, politics, roles of women
posted by erdecker @ 3:19 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
One thing I found interesting about One Hundred Years of Solitude is the fact that Marquez combines realism with a sense of fantasy. In some ways, the town of Macando can be normal. Some of the characters in the book are just living their lives without a lot of the nonsense some of the other characters partake in. The characters that are living in the real world part of Macando wake up and begin doing their chores without doing anything out of the ordinary. On the other hand you have the fantasy view of the story, where completely ridiculous things that happen, such as it raining for five years straight or gypsies flying in on magic carpets. A lot of the "magical" things that happen use truth and logic but he over exaggerates those things to intensify the story and keep readers more interested.
With all the different characters in the story it got really difficult to keep all the generations straight. I think Marquez did this so that the reader would keep thinking and putting things together throughout the story.
I'ce been wondering like, is the book a metaphor for things in life, or just a story? Are we meant to take things away from the book, or is it just meant to entertain?
And, what about the supernatural. Is it there to emphasize reality or is it just there to make it more entertaining?
I have no idea. I thought the book was interesting, but confusing. I could honestly keep the generations pretty much straight myself, but I think the point of them all being similar meant to blur the lines between generations. Yes, you are different from your ancestors, but they are the same genes and even if you try you end up becoming like your parents/ancestors. Like your mom does something weird, you say you'll never do something like that, and yet later in life, you do.
I really thought that the book was pretty confusing at first because I had to catch up with all of the new names thrown at me. But as I read along it was easier to remember who is who. Every character ties back to a previous character because most of the characters are all related in some way. A current theme that I found through out the book is solitude. It showed that most of the time, a person being alone results in something bad happening. I thought the ending was really cool but disappointing at the same time. How Melquiades basically made the town and made the story of the Buendia family line before any of them were even born. The disappointing part was how after everything that happened in Macando, the city just disappeared just like that... I guess it leads to a bigger theme that we learned earlier this year; that knowing TOO much is bad. Because when Aureliano (the second to last one) read Melquiade's parchments at the end of the book, he realized it was the history of his family, and after he finished reading it, the town vanished with everyone in it. I felt like all of the writing the author did was a waste of time, but it did make a good ending.
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