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Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
The very first sentence of the novel establishes the cyclical way the novel collapses past, present, and future together. We will not know what happens to Colonel Aureliano Buendía before the firing squad until many chapters later, and the next sentence of the paragraph segues into a time even before Aureliano’s first encounter with ice. Our ability as readers to simultaneously see the past, through reading the chapter, and the future, through the mention of Aureliano facing a firing squad, affects how we imagine the book’s present (the ice discovery).
Pilar Ternera was the one who contributed most to popularize that mystification when she conceived the trick of reading the past in cards as she had read the future before.
This quotation comes from Chapter 3 during the memory plague. Pilar Ternera attempts to quell the fears of the villagers by trying to read the past in her cards instead of the future. The idea that one’s future could reveal one’s past reinforces the idea that time in the novel is cyclical. Instead of operating in linear time, always progressing, the future and the past can look similar enough to make a prediction of what one might look like based on the other.
Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendant of the plans with which José Arcadio Buendía had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Úrsula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle.
This moment comes from Chapter 11, as Aureliano Triste, one of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s seventeen Aurelianos, begins to draw up plans for the railroad to come to Macondo. Although Aureliano Triste lacks the dreamy impracticality of José Arcadio Buendía, both share the determination to update Macondo’s technology and connect it to the times and the outside world. Úrsula recognizes the way the Buendía family repeats patterns over and over, collapsing, reliving the past in the present and the future.
She sank into such an insane state of confusion that she thought little Aureliano was her son the colonel during the time he was taken to see ice, and that the José Arcadio who was at that time in the seminary was her firstborn who had gone off with the gypsies.
This description of Úrsula comes from Chapter 16, during the four years of rain. In this period, she ages quite rapidly. Although Úrsula is able to compensate for her blindness in part by relying on the family’s habitual patterns, this only works on a daily basis. When it comes to the repetition of names and personalities, the absent José Arcadio and the withdrawn Aureliano feel like they could have come out of a much earlier part of her life.
There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendía that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.
This quotation comes from Chapter 19, when Aureliano (II) goes to Pilar Ternera to ask for advice about what to do with his love for Amaranta Úrsula. Although the increasing solitude of the Buendía family means that Aureliano has no actual knowledge of his family history, and therefore doesn’t know his family’s connection with Pilar Ternera, he nevertheless has repeated the same patterns his forefathers have. Pilar Ternera here recognizes that the Buendías, when left to their own devices, will make the same choices. For them, time will always be circular.
