Week 8: 100 Years of Solitude Part 2 (Márquez)

 Hi everyone! I hope everyone is having a good start to their week. The end of this novel felt like quite a different adventure than the first section did. For starters I was starting to really understand the grasp of the expansion of Macondo, it was almost as if capitalism was starting to grow in the town. With the introduction of the banana plantation and the train for ice, we start to understand how important this growth of the town is, which ultimately may have led to its collapse. I also was thinking about magic realism when these advances were happening to the city as the people seemed to be more fascinated with the engineers and builders of the train and plantation than of the magic carpet or the magnet we talked about last class. 

Although I was still lost in memorizing the family names and which Aurelianos is which, I was starting to really understand the idea of repetition and cycles within the novel. It seems as though every generation was dealing with a slightly different variation of the problems of their ancestors. I found that this was really tied together at the end of the novel, when Aureliano (II) is reading the prophecies of the Buendia family and the history of the town as he watches it crumble before him leaving no trace. I kind of thought that 100 Years of Solitude could be the prophecy book that he is reading when the biblical hurricane sweeps the town away. I think this devastating end to the family and the town actually served as the perfect ending to this novel, as it allowed every moment that was experienced throughout the novel to be wiped away from existence just as our memories do to us sometimes. Just as we block out or forget things in our past without thinking even thinking twice about it, the history of Macondo and the Buendia’s was lost in time forever.  

The themes of memory, loss, religion, and time seemed to be tied up in the last section of the book. When Ursula was on her last legs telling stories to her many grandchildren we see her almost lose herself, becoming a figure of memory, almost as the town does as well. Ursula was there at the beginning when the town was founded, and although she dies before the town does, it seems that both the town and Ursula rise and fall together. 

I do however think this ending was rather gruesome with the ants eating the newborn baby and Aureliano (II) wife and the hurricane destroying everything within the town and the history within it. 

My question is about the interplay of religion into this novel. We see many references to religion within this novel, how does the character Remedios the Beauty play into this? Do you think that she actually floated up to heaven as if she was supposed to be an angel, or do you think that she is a metaphor for something larger here?