Jose Arcadio Buendia

The patriarch of the Buendia clan is the discoverer of Macondo. Over the objection of relatives, he has married his cousin Ursula Iguaran. The two families had been intermarrying for centuries in a small town. Near the eve of their wedding, the couple is warned that consummation of the marriage may result in children with pigs’ tails, or child-iguanas. Ursula becomes frigid while Jose’ Arcadio takes up cockfighting. After an insult following a cock bout, he kills Prudencio Aguilar, whose ghost causes the couple to seek refuge in Macondo. Jose Arcadio becomes the father of the later Colonel Aureliano Buendia.

Colonel Aureliano Buendia

Aureliano Buendia is the first human born in Macondo. “Silent and withdrawn,” his fetus weeps in Ursula’s womb. His eyes are open at birth. Clairvoyant, he is possessed of prophetic powers. He impregnates his brother’s mistress, Pilar Ternera, who bears his son, Aureliano Jose. The Colonel casts the longest shadow in the novel. As the most outstanding member of the second generation, it is through his triumphs and failures that we come to understand the theme of solitude.

Jose Arcadio II

Jose Arcadio II is the oldest child of Jose Arcadio and Ursula Buendia. At the age of fourteen, his prodigious sexual development stirs Ursula’s latent, newlywed fears of years past. Soon enough he becomes the lover of the fortune teller Pilar Ternera, attracted to her, so we are told, “by the smell of smoke” under her armpits and skin. To avoid confusion, their son is called “Arcadio,” although baptized as “Jose Arcadio.” Arcadio saves the Colonel from execution by firing squad. His own death, however, is violent yet ambiguous.

Aureliano Segundo, the twin of Jose Arcadio Segundo

The male character next to the Colonel in significance is the son of Santa Sofia de la Piedad and Arcadio. He is also the twin brother of Jose Arcadio Segundo and younger brother of Remedios the Beauty. The Colonel, therefore, is his uncle. His story begins midway in the novel, in the retrospective future, a technique that parallels the beginning of the novel: “Years later on his death bed Aureliano Segundo would remember the rainy afternoon in June when he went into the bedroom to meet his first son.”

Jose Arcadio Segundo IV, Aureliano’s twin

Both twins reflect, in the words of critic Jack Richardson, “the melancholy transition” of Macondo. But if Aureliano is a genial lover of orgies, a reckless no-good, and a creature of passion, Jose Arcadio proves to be a fanatic who reacts against injustice out of moral outrage; he is impulsive and enterprising “but marked with a tragic sign.” He also has a morbid interest in executions. He and his brother fulfill the Buendia legacy of tragic forerunners, doomed to failure and solitude yet achieving a perpetuation of the line.

Aureliano Babilonia, the last adult Buendia

Aureliano Babilonia is the illegitimate offspring of Renata Remedios (Meme) and Mauricio Babilonia, the auto mechanic. Aureliano takes up the obsessive quest of Jose Arcadio IV Segundo, his great-great-grandfather, in deciphering the parchment manuscript containing the Buendia family’s destiny and history. He and Amaranta Ursula are the parents of the baby Aureliano, a child who fulfills the prophetic curse of Buendia incest when he is born with “the tail of a pig.”