77 pages • 2-hour read
One Hundred Years of Solitude
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Úrsula decides to inaugurate the new house additions with a dance. She purchases a pianola (a player piano) for the occasion. The company sends an Italian expert, Pietro Crespi, to show them how to place paper rolls inside it to play tunes. José Arcadio takes apart the pianola to see how it works and does not put it back together right, so on the night of the party, the music plays off-key and arrhythmically.
Pietro returns to Macondo to repair the pianola, and Rebeca develops a crush on him. Her crush is so intense that she begins to eat handfuls of dirt again; she looks out the window every day waiting for the mailman to bring her a letter from him.
Aureliano continues his crush on Remedios, even though she is still a child. He writes a great deal of poetry about her. One night, he gets very drunk with friends, blacks out, and wakes up in Pilar’s bed. He tells her all about his feelings for Remedios, and she comforts him. He tells his parents that he plans to marry her.
José Arcadio consents, as long as Rebeca can marry Pietro. Amaranta also vies for Pietro's affections, to the extent that she declares she plans to stop any wedding, even if she has to die to do so. José Arcadio goes to the Moscotes (the magistrate's family) to ask for permission for Aureliano to marry Remedios. They consent, even though she has not yet begun menstruating, and Aureliano visits every afternoon for lessons.
The physical and mental condition of Melquíades deteriorates. Before he dies, he tells the family to burn mercury in his room for three days. He drowns in the river, and when he dies a second time, others boil the mercury next to his body. However, he is not revived when they burn the mercury, so the Buendías bury him. His death is the first one in Macondo, and his ghost haunts the Buendía household.
Pietro visits Rebeca at the Buendía house and each time brings her a mechanical toy. Rebeca is nervous about Amaranta's threats, so she has Pilar read her future in the cards. She reveals that Rebeca will not be happy so long as her parents remain unburied. José Arcadio finds Rebeca's parents’ bones and buries them next to Melquíades.
Prudencio’s ghost returns. José Arcadio becomes convinced that every day is Monday recurring over and over, and in his distress, he smashes up his laboratory and workshop. Aureliano gets their neighbors to help, and they tie him to a tree.
Chapter 5 Summary
Aureliano and Remedios marry as soon as she begins to menstruate. Rebeca is unhappy because her wedding to Pietro was supposed to be the same day, but it was postponed when he received a letter telling him his mother was about to die. He rode to the capital immediately to see her, but she was in good health. Amaranta is accused of having written the letter, which she vehemently denies. After her plan to prevent Rebeca's wedding to Pietro by ruining her wedding dress fails, she resolves to poison her by putting laudanum, a solution of opium and alcohol, in her coffee.
Father Nicanor Reyna comes to Macondo to officiate the weddings and stays to minister to the people. He decides to build a church and goes door to door collecting for it. He preaches every Sunday in the town square. After mass, he drinks hot chocolate and levitates.
One week before Rebeca’s rescheduled wedding date, Remedios dies of blood poisoning while she is pregnant with twins. Amaranta feels guilty about the death because she was praying for anything to stop Rebeca's wedding, which is further delayed when Úrsula orders a mourning period. While the family is in an extended mourning period, José Arcadio returns. He is much changed, both physically and mentally, by his time as a sailor who purportedly made 65 trips around the world. He is immensely muscular, tattooed all over, and coarse in both word and deed. He makes money by raffling himself off to the town's women for a night. Most of his family dislikes his new persona, with the exception of Rebeca, who goes to his room for sex after being tormented by longing. After her jilted fiancé, Pietro, tearfully protests that the two were raised as siblings, José Arcadio suggests Amaranta as a partner. Pietro begins to court her for marriage and brings her rare and expensive gifts.
Don Apolinar Moscote, the magistrate, worries that the Liberals want war. He explains politics to Aureliano and has the soldiers confiscate all weapons in the town before the election. After the votes are cast, Moscote removes all but 10 votes for the Liberals, replacing them with votes for the Conservatives. Aureliano tells his friends that he is a Liberal, and they suggest he visit a charlatan doctor who is a failed pro-Liberal agitator.
War arrives in Macondo, although it has been waging in the rest of the country for three months. Don Apolinar Moscote drags out Dr. Alirio Noguera—a “charlatan” who arrived in the town with the plan, unearthed by Aureliano, of killing the Moscotes as part of his effort to eliminate the Conservatives—and has him executed in the town square by an army platoon. The captain leads a brutal regime in the town: The priest is beaten, and four men execute a woman who was bitten by a rabid dog. Aureliano decides to end the violence, organizes his friends, takes the army garrison by surprise, and kills the captain and soldiers. The people name Arcadio the new leader of the town. Aureliano decides to become Colonel Aureliano Buendía and leaves town with his friends to join forces with the revolutionary general Victorio Medina.
Chapter 6 Summary
This chapter begins with an overview of the major events of Colonel Aureliano Buendía's life after he leaves Macondo.
Arcadio rules Macondo as a tyrant, imposing mandatory military service, sequestering the priest, and shooting an anti-authoritarian musician. He punishes people by putting them in stocks. When he hears that Don Apolinar Moscote said something rude about him, Arcadio has his daughters whipped and ties Moscote to the firing squad post.
Úrsula is furious about Arcadio's behavior and whips him. She becomes the new town ruler and reverses many of Arcadio's rules. She goes to bathe her husband, José Arcadio, who is still tied to the tree, and tells him the family’s news.
Pietro falls in love with Amaranta and finally moves forward with their wedding. Once the date is set, however, she rejects him. The rejection torments him, and he dies by suicide a month later. Úrsula buries him next to Melquíades.
Arcadio seeks out Pilar, whom he does not realize is his biological mother, for sex. She rejects him, horrified, but when he insists, she tells him to leave his door unlocked that night. She paid a virgin named Santa Sofía de la Piedad to go to Arcadio in her stead; they begin meeting up secretly and have a daughter together.
Young José Arcadio steals land from the peasants around him and collects taxes from others. Arcadio, his son, visits to tell him there have been complaints and offers to set up a registry office so that they can both collect fees from the people. Úrsula discovers that Arcadio has been embezzling from the registry and yells at him.
Colonel Gregorio Stevenson comes to town with a message from Colonel Aureliano Buendía for Arcadio: Surrender the town to save lives and property. Arcadio does not believe him, imprisons him, and resolves to defend the town instead of surrendering. The army comes, wipes out all the soldiers, and executes Arcadio.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
In these chapters, the political, sexual, and familial intrigue of the Buendía family reaches new heights. The child marriage of Remedios to Aureliano echoes García Márquez's own marriage to a woman he first met when she was a child. Even after Remedios dies while giving birth to twins, she is only 14 years old. Úrsula venerates her as a saint and lights a candle in front of a picture of her as though Remedios were a religious figure. Because she dies so young, Remedios cannot become a full-fledged person with her own failures and human flaws who might disappoint Úrsula; hence, she is a perfect candidate for veneration.
Additionally, Remedios's death begins a thematic pattern in the book: the death of women characters through childbirth. Many—but not all—of the female characters die in this way, and their deaths tend to be portrayed with veneration. In contrast, Amaranta eventually dies as a spiteful virgin who focused on others' failures and unhappiness rather than finding her own happiness. The portrayal of women characters in this book overall reflects traditional patriarchal misogyny: A woman who does not marry falls into a flat archetype of acquiescent sex worker or vengeful virgin.
Death is not necessarily final in Macondo. As in an earlier section when the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar haunts José Arcadio Buendía, the dead can transform in this magical realist world into characters who retain all aspects of their being except their mortal bodies. Some ghosts repeatedly visit the same characters, so that the conflict between the two characters is never fully resolved. In this section, Melquíades dies and instructs the others to boil mercury over his body in a resurrection attempt. His resurrection seems possible, as he died in Singapore earlier in the text and subsequently returned to the world of the living. Boiling the mercury slows the time of his decay; however, this time it does not resurrect him.
Political intrigue and conflict between the Liberals and the Conservatives has high stakes and consequences in these chapters for Aureliano. Unlike many of the other Aurelianos who are born later in the family line, the Colonel leads a sweeping life over the course of his military service and career as a revolutionary.
Politically, Macondo moves from being governed by de facto community rule in which the opinions of José Arcadio Buendía are weighed heavily but not enforced with violence to upheaval as the result of a brief attempt to impose a system of provincial magistrates accountable to the capital. Violence and equally brief autocracies follow this upheaval, as when first Arcadio, and then Úrsula, rule Macondo. Shifts in the form of government for Macondo echo potential shifts in the government of Colombia. As is common in novels of family sagas, the town of Macondo and the extended Buendía family represent dynamic shifts in a particular cultural context.
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