1. Explain possible answers for the Buendias’ limited capacity for love. 2. Contrast the concepts of solitude and solidarity through one generation of the Buendia family. 3. Comment on the stability of the Buendia women, when compared with the Buendia males. 4. What part does fantasy play within the novel? […]
Read more Study Help Essay QuestionsCritical Essays The Use of Prophecy
We learn that adolescence made Aureliano (the last adult Buendia) silent and “definitely solitary.” His brooding demeanor strikes both an echo and a foreboding in our minds: we sense in his tension that something will soon occur. He is always quiet and subdued. But he apprehends future events intuitively, and […]
Read more Critical Essays The Use of ProphecyCritical Essays Machismo vs. Heroism
Machismo (the need to express one’s masculinity through brute force, sexual profligacy, proliferation of male heirs, and subjugation of others — especially women) is a quintessential trait of the Buendias. Machismo is both responsible for their gallantry and for their courage, as well as being responsible for their suicidal persistence […]
Read more Critical Essays Machismo vs. HeroismCritical Essays Sense of Illegitimacy
Another obvious theme of Garcia Marquez is the sense of illegitimacy. In this novel, the logic of incest is always official bastardization, which is expressed in the ancient Buendia fear that incest will eventually produce a child with a pig’s tail. Garcia Marquez makes that fear a kind of self-fulfilling […]
Read more Critical Essays Sense of IllegitimacyCritical Essays The Use of Cyclical Time and Fate
Aureliano Segundo enters the novel midway — just before he dies — remembering events that are yet to be narrated. We come to know his story, then, as a retrospective future that parallels the beginning of the novel’s main plot. This chronological reversal of the novel’s various plots is a […]
Read more Critical Essays The Use of Cyclical Time and FateCritical Essays The Use of Fantasy
In 100 Hundred Years of Solitude, fantasy functions, for the most part, as parody. The official lies of the banana company, as well as Fernanda’s delusions of being a queen, are both powerful examples of how even frustrated ambition ultimately leads a person to succumb to a life of fantasy. […]
Read more Critical Essays The Use of FantasyCritical Essays The Theme of Solitude
Almost without exception, the Buendia males are marked, as it were, with the tragic sign of solitude. And perhaps this theme can best be understood if one studies the individual characters themselves. As the most outstanding member of the second generation, for example, Colonel Aureliano Buendia is a perfect example […]
Read more Critical Essays The Theme of SolitudeGabriel Garcia Marquez Biography
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (nicknames: Gabo, Gabito) was born March 6, 1928. Like the strange banana town of Macondo in 100 Hundred Years of Solitude, his home was a tiny Colombian village called Aracataca, near the Caribbean coast. He seems not to have known his father and did not meet his […]
Read more Gabriel Garcia Marquez BiographyCharacter Analysis Pilar Ternera
The other woman of significance is Pilar Ternera. Among the original founders of Macondo, her parents took her there to separate her from a man who raped her at fourteen “and continued to love her until she was twenty-two.” Pilar comes to the Buendia house as a chore girl but […]
Read more Character Analysis Pilar TerneraCharacter Analysis Ursula Buendia
In all the stories by Garcia Marquez , the women have long lives. They seem more able than the men to make the best of life and to finally accept the inevitable solitude of aging in chronological time. Jack Richardson, in his review of this novel, correctly summed up this […]
Read more Character Analysis Ursula Buendia