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The enigmatic Melquíades, a traveling gypsy man, serves as a friend, teacher, and chronicler of the Buendía family throughout his life and even posthumously. José Arcadio Buendía initially befriends Melquíades because of his obsession with the scientific discoveries that Melquíades brings from abroad, like the magnets and the glass lens. From his travels, Melquíades has gathered a huge store of the world’s knowledge and its ills, suffering from many diseases until he dies for the first time in Singapore. He returns from the dead to save Macondo from the Insomnia Plague, and then after his second death, continues as a ghost to guide various Buendía sons through contemplation of his manuscripts. However, his full manuscript cannot be translated until one hundred years have passed. As his manuscript tells the history of the Buendía family, many scholars interpret him as the book’s narrator. He writes the family history with a full understanding of its shape, how their past, present, and future are intimately connected, resulting in the circular form of the novel.
One of the most common readings of Melquíades is as an avatar of storytelling or collective memory. His knowledge is an infinite repository of answers, but he only appears or can be understood when that knowledge is needed. For example, he comes back from the dead to save Macondo from the Insomnia plague with his knowledge. Although other Buendía sons besides Aureliano (II) study Melquíades’s manuscript, he warns them they will not be able to understand it. In the same way, a story can offer different types of wisdom depending on when in one’s life a person hears it, and some stories we cannot understand until we are ready, or they have relevance. When Melquíades prepares Aureliano (II) to unravel the family’s history, he emphasizes the truth of the massacre José Arcadio Segundo witnesses, passing on the true collective history of Macondo. Once Aureliano (II) begins to translate the manuscript, Melquíades dies for good, much in the same way an author’s authority over a text loses significance once passed on to a reader, who makes the story come alive through their own eyes.
