Summary: Chapter 1
At that time Macondo was a village of
twenty adobe houses . . . the world was so recent that many things lacked
names. . . .
(See Important Quotations Explained)
One Hundred Years of Solitude begins
as a flashback, with Colonel Aureliano Buendía recollecting the
years immediately following the founding of Macondo, when a band
of gypsies frequently bring technological marvels to the dreamy,
isolated village. José Arcadio Buendía, the insatiably curious founder
of the town, is obsessed with these magical implements. Using supplies
given to him by Melquíades, the leader of the gypsies, he immerses
himself in scientific study, to the frustration of his more practical
wife, Úrsula Iguarán. Eventually, with Melquíades’s prodding, José
Arcadio Buendía begins to explore alchemy, the pseudo-science of
making gold out of other metals. He is driven by a desire for progress
and by an intense search for knowledge that forces him into solitude. Increasingly,
he withdraws from human contact, becoming unkempt, antisocial, and
interested only in his pursuit of knowledge. But José Arcadio Buendía
is not always a solitary scientist. On the contrary, he is the leader
who oversaw the building of the village of Macondo, an idyllic place
dedicated to hard work and order, filled with young people, and
as yet, unvisited by death.
In his quest for knowledge and progress, José Arcadio
Buendía’s obsession shifts to a desire to establish contact with
civilization. He leads an expedition to the north, since he knows
there is only swamp to the west and south and mountains to the east.
But he then decides that Macondo is surrounded by water and inaccessible
to the rest of the world. When he plans to move Macondo to another,
more accessible place, however, he is stopped by his wife, who refuses
to leave. Thwarted, he turns his attention, finally, to his children:
José Arcadio, who has inherited his father’s great strength, and
Aureliano (later known as Colonel Aureliano Buendía), who seems,
even as a child, enigmatic and withdrawn. When the gypsies return,
they bring word that Melquíades is dead. Despite his sadness at
the news, José Arcadio Buendía does not lose interest in new technology
and marvels: when the gypsies show him ice, the patriarch of Macondo proclaims
it the greatest invention in the world.
Summary: Chapter 2
In telling the story of Macondo’s founding, the book now
moves backward in time. The cousins José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán
are born in a small village, the great-grandchildren of those surviving
Sir Francis Drake’s attack on Riohacha. Úrsula is afraid to consummate
their marriage, as children of incest were said to have terrible
genetic defects. There was precedent for this: two of their relatives
gave birth to a child with a pig’s tail. But as time passes after their
marriage, and Ursula continues to refuse to have sex out of fear of
the genetic deformity of their child, the people of the village
begin to mock José Arcadio Buendía. When a rival, Prudencio Aguilar, implies
that Buendía is impotent, Buendía kills him. Haunted by guilt and
the specter of Aguilar, José Arcadio Buendía decides to leave his
home. After many months of wandering, they establish the village
of Macondo.
On seeing the ice of the gypsies, José Arcadio Buendía
remembers his dream of Macondo as a city built with mirror-walls,
which he interprets to mean ice. He immerses himself again in his
scientific study, this time accompanied by his son Aureliano. Meanwhile,
the older son, José Arcadio—still a teenager—is seduced by a local woman,
Pilar Ternera, who is attracted to him because of the huge size
of his penis. Eventually, he impregnates her. Before their child can
be born, however, he meets a young gypsy girl and falls madly in love
with her. When the gypsies leave town, José Arcadio joins them. Grief-stricken
at the loss of her eldest son, Úrsula tries to follow the gypsies,
leaving behind her newborn girl, Amaranta. Five months later, Úrsula
returns, having discovered the simple, two-day journey through the
swamp that connects Macondo with civilization.
Analysis: Chapters 1–2
One Hundred Years of Solitude does not
adopt a straightforward approach to telling its version of history.
The progression of time from the town’s founding to its demise,
from the origins of the Buendía clan to their destruction, provides
a rough structure for the novel. But García Márquez does not necessarily
tell events in the order that they happen. Rather, flitting forward
and backward in time, García Márquez creates the mythic feel and
informality of a meandering oral history. Although the first extended
episode of the novel tells of the gypsies who come to Macondo bearing
technological innovations that seem miraculous to the citizens of
the isolated village, the first sentence of the novel refers to
an episode far in the future, the planned execution of Colonel Aureliano
Buendía. The story of the gypsies, leading up to the moment when
José Arcadio Buendía sees ice for the first time, is cast as Colonel
Aureliano Buendía’s recollection, and so, immediately in the novel,
there is a chronological disjunction.
This feeling of befuddled time is compounded by the fact
that, at first, we are not sure of One Hundred Years of
Solitude’s historical setting. At the founding of Macondo,
“the world was so recent that many things lacked names,” but we
also learn that Ursula’s great-grandmother was alive when Sir Francis
Drake attacked Riohacha, an actual event that took place in 1568.
In real life, this perception of time would be impossible. Obviously
Sir Francis Drake lived long after the world grew old enough for
every object to have a name. Critic Regina Janes points out that
these two occurrences are not meant to be an accurate picture of
historical events. Instead, the disjunction between them allows
García Márquez to disorient us, getting us thoroughly lost in the
murky historical swamp in which he has placed us.
