Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928 to Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran and Gabriel Eligio Garcia in Aracataca,
Columbia. He won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is the history of the town of Macondo and of several generations of the town''s leading family, the Buendias, but its real themes are vast, alluding to the whole social history of Latin America and to the very basis of social coexistence. The historical themes include; conquest and colonization, settlement and scientific discovery, civil wars, foreign economic intervention, technological change, and finally the decay and disappearance of a long-established way of life.
The story of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has various dimensions as Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote the novel with multiple interpretations. In the early 19th century, Jose Arcadio Buendia leads twenty-two families to populate Macondo, an isolated agricultural village full of mud and wattle houses in the wilderness. The people of Macondo become aware of modern discoveries and inventions from the outside world when Melquiades, a wandering gypsy magician, introduce, magnets, a magnifying glass, alchemists'' lore, and so on. He (Melquiades) amazes the villagers, especially Buendia, who pursues extravagant experiments and neglects his duties to family and village. Buendia also tries, but fails, to find a route to the outside world. His wife, Ursula Iguaran, brings strangers to Macondo, which begins to develop into a small commercial town. Buendia finally goes mad from his frenzied attempts to comprehend all the changes, and is tied to a chestnut tree in the patio, where he eventually dies. Melquiades, meanwhile, has returned to live in the Buendia house and write a long document in a strange script. He dies, but his spirit will return occasionally to coach those who try to decipher his manuscripts. The arrival of Melquiades and his gypsy band, with their navigational instruments, magnifying glass, and so forth, is a metaphor for the beginning of technical and scientific awareness, which would have reached towns like Macondo some time between 1830 and 1860. The plot basically deals with the rise, maturity, and decline of the Buendia family and Macondo and, the Narrator treat all events in dispassionate tone. This allows writer to get away with the hyperbole and fantasy which mark this narrative. It also allows the reader to understand and accept why Jose Arcadio Buendia and his sons might be moved by ice in the gypsy fair rather than flying carpets.
It’s not easy to determine whether Macondo was doomed from the very beginning as it has seen a rise of great civilization and plenty of blessings from God. But is may be said that Macondo was doomed with the start of solitary of Jose Arcadio Buendia. The founder of Macondo, Jose Arcadio Buendia, is the first great solitary. He becomes so obsessed with his own search for truth that he neglects his family and ultimately loses all touch with outer reality. His wife, Ursula, is perhaps the greatest of the anti-solitary figures, the person who more than anyone else holds the family and the house together. She takes in a foster child and later insists on rearing the bastard children of her sons and grandsons. Her whole life is devoted to strengthening social bonds. The word solitude appears frequently throughout the Novel, even in surprising places and with surprising usages. Marquez does this to underline the importance of solitude in the novel. Solitude can be a healthy thing as the village grows and more and more frightening aspects of civilization come to Macondo. The family''s incest problem is representative of their greater failure to communicate and reach out to the rest of the world.
The fall of Macondo was due to disastrous rains which last for four years, eleven months, and two days. Aureliano Segundo was at home when the rains started and stays there, temporarily abandonina Cotes to putter around the house and look after the remaining children, Amaranta Ursula and Meme''s son Aureliano. When the rains stop, Ursula recovers her lucidity, gets up from bed, and again tries to restore the house, combating the moths and red ants that have been devouring it. When she finds Jose Arcadio Segundo in Melquiades''s old room, as mad as his great-grandfather had been under the chestnut tree, and surrounded by the seventy-two excrement-filled chamber pots, he says "Time passes," and she replies, "Yes, but not so much" - realizing as she does so that this is the same dialogue she had once had with her son, the colonel, but with the roles reversed. Again, Garcia Marquez has given us the key to read his text: repetition, but with a change. When Aureliano Segundo finally returns to Petra Cotes, he returns to the Buendia household "convinced that not only Ursula but all the inhabitants of Macondo were waiting for it to clear in order to die." (Garcia Marquez, 1998) Aureliano Segundo is more interested in the fortune Ursula has hidden somewhere in the house and spends a great deal of time and energy excavating the house in a fruitless attempt to find it. The rains that follow the massacre are symbolic in three different ways. The first reference, and the most obvious one, is the reference to the flood in the book of Genesis. As in Noah''s time, the land had become full of wickedness and the flood gave rise to a new world. The reason why this symbolism does not completely explain the flood of Macondo is that, in the book of Genesis, the flood was an opportunity for rebirth and regeneration, whereas in Macondo it merely leads to a swift decline. The ending of Solitude has provoked much controversy. In truth, the last three pages of Solitude are a densely textured maze of allusion and erudition, purposely crafted for scholars to have fun with. What is important is the manner in which the Buendia family ends. The twin themes of incest and solitude come together with Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula. Still more subtly, Garcia Marquez has reserved a final ironic twist for us: in the last chapter, he suggests that the whole book is not what it appears to be, but may be, like the town and the family, a creation of the gypsy Melquiades, or perhaps (when he has a character say "Literature is the greatest toy for fooling people") simply a hallucination. Critical responses to Garcia Marquez''s work have, in part, been determined by the demands that magical realism makes on its readers to accommodate both fantasy and reality within a single narrative structure. Garcia Marquez''s "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is not just the product--the culmination-of three centuries of post-Conquest history. Rather, taking the intermixture of cultures in the Conquest as a point of origin, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" responds to and critiques the European narratives of discovery that as much created the Conquest as they retell it.
Conclusion Although critics have often called attention to the unusual combination of fantasy, realism, humor, and literary allusiveness in Colombia''s Gabriel García Marquez''s One Hundred Years of Solitude, one striking possible illustration of the combination seems not to have been pointed out. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, then, is partly an attempt to render the reality of Garcia Marquez’s own experiences in a fictional narrative. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is an extremely ambitious novel. To a certain extent, in its sketching of the histories of civil war, plantations, and labor unrest, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” tells a story about Colombian history and, even more broadly, about Latin America’s struggles with colonialism and with its own emergence into modernity.