One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon."

During José Arcadio Buendía's failed attempt to find a direct route from Macondo to the capital, his group of explorers comes upon the skeleton of this Spanish ship. It serves as a symbol for Spanish colonialism in Colombia.

“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."

José Arcadio Buendía, one of the founders of Macondo, insists that the town is not firmly rooted until someone dies there. This statement foreshadows both the death of Melquíades and the deaths of the entire Buendía family.

“The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning or end."

When Aureliano falls in love with Remedios, he experiences logorrhea. He writes poetry on every surface he can find. The poetry survives Remedios; her death is one of Aureliano's character’s motivations for losing himself in war.

“After several days of listening, with their ears against the walls, they perceived the deep cloc-cloc."

When Rebeca comes to the Buendía house as a child, she carries the bones of her parents with her in a sack. However, she forgets to bury them, and they end up walled into the house because of the noise they make. When Pilar predicts to Rebeca that she's unhappy because her parents remain unburied, the family searches for—and eventually finds—the bones.

“Pilar Ternera bit her lips with a sad smile [...] 'Where you put your eye, you put your bullet'. Aureliano relaxed with the proof of the omen."

Pilar predicts that Aureliano will fight in a war. She is correct, as he becomes the Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Throughout the text, her predictions are proven correct, and prophecy by everyday characters plays a central role in the book's narrative structure.

“A huge man had arrived. His square shoulders barely fitted through the doorways. He was wearing a medal of Our Lady of Help around his bison neck, his arms were completely covered with cryptic tattooing, and on his right wrist was the tight copper bracelet of the niños-en-cruz amulet."

When José Arcadio returns from his unexpected travels around the world, he appears to be a very different person. Thematically, subsequent characters who share his name also share aspects of his likeness: that of a hearty man with thick features and a large presence. The bracelet is a reference to related spiritual practices to protect the wearer and ensure sexual prowess.

“Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had 17 male children by 17 different women and they were exterminated one after another [...]"

The details provided about the Colonel's life are hyperbolic. Here, his accomplishments are summarized at the beginning of a chapter using a narrative technique commonly employed by García Márquez: front-loading major details set in the future and then providing explanatory context in the following pages.

“When he heard the shout he thought that it was the final command to the firing squad. He opened his eyes with a shudder of curiosity, expecting to meet the incandescent trajectory of the bullets, but he only saw Captain Roque Carnicero with his arms in the air and José Arcadio crossing the street with his fearsome shotgun ready to go off."

At the moment Colonel Aureliano Buendía stands in front of the firing squad, he expects to die. Instead, José Arcadio’s threats save him. The book's opening sets up the expectations that the Colonel will die; this passage subverts those expectations to take the story in another direction entirely, which is characteristic of the novel’s many plot twists.

“Any children will be born with the tail of a pig."

When Amaranta finally rejects her nephew, Aureliano José, with whom she has been having a sexualized relationship, she claims it's primarily because any child they have will be "born with the tail of a pig." This is a prediction Úrsula Iguarán’s mother originally made about her fears of unusual physical characteristics because Úrsula Iguarán and José Arcadio Buendía are cousins.

“[...] he asked him, without showing any particular interest, where the exact location of his heart was. The doctor listened with his stethoscope and then painted a circle on his chest with a piece of cotton dipped in iodine."

On the day Colonel Aureliano Buendía plans to sign the armistice agreement and end the war between the Liberals and the Conservatives, he asks his doctor to show him exactly where his heart is. However, in a moment of narrative irony, the doctor shows him the wrong place, so when the Colonel attempts to shoot himself in the heart, he survives.

“Throughout the long history of the family the insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed to be certain. While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the José Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign."

Úrsula believes that the names given to new generations of the family hold power and that people given the same name exhibit similar personality characteristics. Here, she elucidates precisely what she believes those characteristics to be. Once named, a character cannot change his or her fate.

“It was a delirious prosperity that even made him laugh, and he could not help doing crazy things to release his good humor. 'Cease, cows, life is short,' he would shout."

The presence of Petra Cotes makes Aureliano Segundo's wealth grow exponentially. Instead of saving his wealth, he burns through it, never having known scarcity. Here, he jokingly tells the cows to stop procreating and enjoy life. His friends place these words on his coffin after he dies.

“Fernanda was a woman who was lost in the world. She had been born and raised in a city six hundred miles away, a gloomy city where on ghostly nights the coaches of the viceroys still rattled through the cobbled streets. Thirty-two belfries tolled a dirge at six in the afternoon."

In keeping with the narrative connections García Márquez draws between individual characters and their relationships to the places where they live, here he draws a strong connection between Fernanda's closed-off conservatism and the death-adjacent imagery of her birthplace. Her birth city is described as gloomy, ghostly, and filled with the sound of a dirge.

“With the suspicious attention of a diamond merchant he examined the banana meticulously, dissecting it with a special scalpel, weighing the pieces on a pharmacist's scale, and calculating its breadth with a gunsmith's calipers." 

Mr. Herbert comes to Macondo as a traveling salesman. It is only by chance, when Aureliano Segundo invites him over to the Buendía house for dinner, that he discovers the local banana varieties. This discovery leads to the banana company's move to the area and all the events that follow.

“[...] the man barely had time to let out a cry of terror as he cracked his skull and was killed outright on the cement floor. The foreigners who heard the noise in the dining room and hastened to remove the body noticed the suffocating odor of Remedios the Beauty on his skin."

Men are obsessed with Remedios the Beauty even though she does not seem to notice them. The oil on her skin acts like a carnivorous plant to bring men closer to their accidental deaths, just like a Venus flytrap or corpse flower. Here, her body is blamed for the men’s lack of sexual self-control.

“Her life was spent in weaving her shroud. It might have been said that she wove during the day and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating solitude in that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it."

As Penelope in The Odyssey weaves a shroud during the day and unmakes it at night, Amaranta weaves her death shroud. However, Amaranta weaves it very slowly, because it was prophesied that once she finishes it, she will die. Instead of trying to change the prophesy, she and other characters treat it as inevitable.

“[...] Meme lost track of the days. Much time had passed when she saw the last yellow butterfly destroyed in the blades of the fan and she admitted as an irremediable truth that Mauricio Babilonia had died."

Much like the yellow flowers that fall in Macondo after the death of José Arcadio Buendía, the yellow butterflies are associated with the presence of Mauricio Babilonia. When Fernanda whisks Meme away to the convent, the butterflies follow them for a time.

“When José Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying faceup in the darkness. He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached [...] only then did he discover that he was lying against dead people."

José Arcadio Segundo is the sole survivor of a massacre in Macondo's town square, in which troops working for the banana company herded the striking workers into the square and shot them with rapid-fire artillery. After he survives, the people say they cannot remember the event, though perhaps they do not want to admit that the massacre ever happened.

“It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days."

After the banana company massacre, the company announces that as soon as the rain stops, they will implement promises to the workers and hold a festival for Macondo. Instead, it rains for years, and by the time the rain is over, the company has left town. The relationship between the company's statements and the weather makes some inhabitants of Macondo believe that it was the company that caused the rain.

“Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room."

Within Melquíades’s workshop, it seems like time stopped. The sense of time as nonlinear permeates the Buendía house, with members of different generations behaving in similar ways, having similar names, and sharing overlapping timelines. Even the narrative structure of the text overall has a fluid relationship with the temporal.

“The first night that the group visited that greenhouse of illusions, the splendid and taciturn old woman who guarded the entrance in a wicker rocking chair felt that time was turning back to its earliest origins when among the five who were arriving she saw a bony, jaundiced man with Tartar cheekbones, marked forever and from the beginning of the world with the pox of solitude."

When the fourth-generation Aureliano visits the zoological brothel of Pilar Ternera, she sees in his bone structure and body the ghosts of the Aurelianos who came before him. She is a quiet presence in Macondo throughout the entirety of its history, and she makes many of the liaisons among the Buendía family possible. In a sense, she is an honorary Buendía.

“In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, and they disemboweled the mattresses [...]"

With their incestuous sexual passion, Amaranta Úrsula and her nephew Aureliano literally destroy the Buendía family house. The house has been a synecdoche for the family's history and standing in the town: When they destroy it, they also destroy their legacy.

“The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants."

Aureliano finally deciphers Melquíades’s parchments to see this line about the history of the Buendía family. The "first of the line" refers to José Arcadio Buendía, who was indeed tied to a tree in his later years. The "last is being eaten by ants" refers to Aureliano's newborn son, whom he finds dead at only a few days old and, indeed, being eaten by ants.