Reader Response #1

[Marla Westervelt]

One Hundred Years of Solitude opens in a place where not all things
have names, and death has not yet visited. Those two short facts give
me an inability to relate. In the world that we live in, there are too
many words to possibly learn in a lifetime, and death visits us on a
daily basis. Additionally, there seems to be a disconnect in where is
history this book actually takes place. The technological advances
seem to be disjointed with a lack of language. This paradoxical
relationship to the technology and language give the novel a mystical
setting, as it does not make complete sense. Márquez succeeds in
putting us in a world that we can not exactly find in our textbooks.
José Arcadio Buendía, the father, is a multi-dimensional man. He has
this leader exterior: he kills a man for making fun of him, he leads
in the creation of Macondo, and he serves as a "go to" man for the
entire town. Yet, in his pursuit to be the lead the town to greatness
he gets caught up in his own different ventures. He pursues knowledge,
and then he pursues a connection to the outside world. In each of
these conquests, he alienates those around him, especially his wife
Ursula. She must try to keep his feet on the group and constantly
remind him to maintain his sanity.
In the first couple chapters the world of Macondo goes through
drastic changes. It begins as a town created by José Arcadio Buendía;
it's small, isolated, and death is not something that they have
experienced yet. Each time the Gypsies come they bring something from
the outside world that seems to shove Macondo a little further in to
the future. With each shove it is as if the town is losing it's
innocence. Of course at first it is slowly. However, it is a little
bit shocking when the first death comes about.
I found it very interesting when the entire town suffered from
amnesia. The skewed sense of reality in the book became really
apparent when the entire town began to suffer from this odd loss of
memory. The lack of cohesion with the real world became even more
apparent when Melquiades came to the town with an antidote that
miraculously cured the entire town. It seems as if some of the
character in the book have a sort to magically inclination.