Summary: Chapter 5
Soon after Remedios reaches puberty, she and Aureliano
are married. (Rebeca’s wedding, which is to take place at the same
time, is postponed because Pietro Crespi is called away by an urgent
letter that says his mother is gravely ill. The letter proves false,
and Amaranta is suspected of forging it to delay the marriage.)
Remedios provides a breath of fresh air in the Buendía household,
endearing herself to everybody and even deciding to raise Aureliano’s
bastard son—born to Pilar Ternera—as her own child. He is named
Aureliano José. Soon after the marriage, however, Remedios dies
of a sudden internal ailment, possibly a miscarriage, and the house
plunges into mourning. This period of grief proves yet another in
the interminable set of obstacles for Rebeca and Pietro Crespi,
who cannot be married while the Buendía household is in mourning.
Another setback is the tremendously long time it takes to build
the first church in Macondo, which has been visited for the first
time by organized religion. The priest who is building the church
makes the startling discovery that José Arcadio Buendía’s apparent
madness is not as severe as everyone thinks. The gibberish he spouts
is not nonsense, but pure Latin in which he can converse.
The period of mourning and delay are simultaneously
brought to an end by the return of José Arcadio, the oldest son
of José Arcadio Buendía. He is a beast of a man—enormously strong, tattooed
all over his body, impulsive, and crude. Despite her engagement
to Pietro Crespi, Rebeca is enthralled by
José Arcadio’s masculinity, and they begin a torrid affair, governed
by lust. The affair ends in marriage, and they are exiled from the
house by the outraged Ursula. There develops, however, a growing
tenderness between Crespi and Amaranta, whom he had previously spurned
in favor of Rebeca.
Aureliano, who had resigned himself to solitude after
the death of Remedios, soon finds a larger concern: the impending
war between the Conservative government—represented in Macondo by
the magistrate who is Aureliano’s father-in-law, Don Apolinar Moscote—and
the insurgent Liberals. Upset by the dishonesty and corruption of
the Conservatives, Aureliano allies himself with the Liberals. When
war breaks out and the town is brutally occupied by the Conservative
army, Aureliano leads young men of the town in a rebellion, conquering
the town for the Liberals. He leaves at the head of a small Liberal
army and is henceforth known in the novel as Colonel Aureliano Buendía.
Eventually, he becomes the leader of the Liberal armies.
Summary: Chapter 6
Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves Macondo with
his hastily assembled troops and joins the national civil war effort,
fathering seventeen children around the country as he goes. He leaves Arcadio—the
illegitimate son of José Arcadio and Pilar Ternera—in charge of
the town in his absence, and Arcadio becomes a dictator, obsessed
with order and given to cruelty. When he tries to sleep with Pilar
Ternera, his own mother, she sends him a young virgin named Santa
Sofía de la Piedad instead. He marries her, and she gives birth
to three children: Remedios the Beauty, Aureliano Segundo, and José
Arcadio Segundo. When the Liberals lose the war and the Conservatives
retake the town, Arcadio is executed by a firing squad. While the
war rages, and Arcadio’s dictatorship continues, Pietro Crespi proposes
marriage to Amaranta, who cruelly rejects him despite her love for
him, and he commits suicide. Penitent, she burns her hand horribly,
covering it with the black bandage that she will wear until her
death.
Analysis: Chapters 5–6
One Hundred Years of Solitude is remarkable
for its scope: it is concerned both with events on a grand scale—such
as the rebel uprising that begins in this section—and with the minute
aspects of its protagonists’ lives. It also runs the gamut from
the sublime to the disgusting. In one breath, it seems, García Márquez
will celebrate the supernatural, and in the next, he will investigate,
in great detail, the filthiest of whorehouses. When, in this section,
Remedios Moscote reaches puberty, it does not suffice for García
Márquez to simply retell the fact: he also produces bloody proof. One
Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel that, like the prophecies
of Melquíades the gypsy, contains everything—the grand and the insignificant,
the absurd and the transcendent. In that sense, One Hundred
Years of Solitude is mimetic: that is, it imitates real
life. Real life, of course, includes a seemingly infinite number
of voices and a wide array of emotions and qualities. One
Hundred Years of Solitude gets its epic scope from its
attempt to imitate reality, to include everything that life includes.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude’s attempt at mimesis, too,
lies one reason for its confused timeline and tendency to jump from
story to story without obvious transition. García Márquez believes
that modern life is entropic—chaotic, tending toward eventual dissolution.
Thus, he refuses to impose a rigid structure on his novel, choosing
instead to allow the novel to meander digressively, at times unraveling,
toward the eventual apocalypse at its close.
Despite García Márquez’s determination to capture the
variety and scope of real life, however, the reader will notice
that his language sometimes tends toward the metaphoric and euphemistic rather
than the literal and precise. For instance: although García Márquez
does not shy away from a narration of the moment when Remedios Moscote
first finds menstrual blood in her underwear, he avoids an actual
mention of the blood. Instead, he calls it “chocolate-colored paste.”
And in describing Rebeca’s first sex act with José Arcadio, García
Márquez refers to her loss of virginity as a loss of “intimacy,”
a curious circumlocution. These moments leave us asking why García
Márquez avoids graphic and realistic use of language throughout
the novel in his descriptions of sex and violence and why a novel
that explores all aspects of life, both beautiful and disgusting,
substitutes euphemisms for a realistic depiction of events. One
answer is that García Márquez brings the ordinary world into the
realm of the fantastic by using poetic language for mundane things
and mundane language for magical events. Another answer might be
that García Márquez is attempting, through these circumlocutions,
to use language that his characters themselves might use. The novel
speaks in Remedios Moscote’s voice, describing her blood as she
might have. This narrative technique, in which the novel assumes
the voice of a character without openly indicating that it is switching
perspectives, is known as free indirect discourse. One Hundred
Years of Solitude’s epic feel can be accounted for by its
multiplicity of voices, its desire to see things from different
perspectives, and its descriptions of them in the subjective terms
used by different characters.
