Summary: Chapter 7
The Liberals have lost the war, and Colonel Aureliano
Buendía, along with his friend Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, is captured
and sentenced to execution by firing squad. His last request is
that the sentence be carried out in his hometown of Macondo. He
is saved at the final instant, however, by his brother José Arcadio,
and, immediately, Colonel Buendía launches another uprising, one
of thirty-two he will lead during his military career. He encounters
a long string of failures, however, and is abandoned by the Liberal
party’s official representatives. Eventually, though, he enjoys
some success and is able to recapture Macondo and other coastal
territory. But an assassination attempt leaves him disillusioned
with the constant fighting, and he begins to realize that he is
fighting not for ideology but for pride alone. He starts writing
poetry again, as he used to do during his courtship with Remedios
Moscote.
While Aureliano is fighting his wars, Santa Sofía de
la Piedad gives birth to twins fathered by her dead husband, Arcadio;
they are named José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. Apart
from this happy event, however, tragedy strikes the Buendía family repeatedly.
José Arcadio dies mysteriously, and it is unclear whether he has
been murdered or has committed suicide. Rebeca, his wife, becomes
a hermit, living the rest of her life in solitary grief. Colonel Gerineldo
Márquez, who is left in command of the town when Aureliano leaves
yet again to fight, has been in love for years with the solitary
Amaranta, who spurns him as she did Pietro Crespi. And finally,
after years of living outside tied to a tree, José Arcadio Buendía,
the patriarch of the clan, dies. A rain of yellow flowers from the
sky marks his death.
Summary: Chapter 8
Aureliano José had been destined to find
. . . happiness . . . but had been directed by a wrong interpretation
of the cards.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Time passes, and Aureliano José, the son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía
and Pilar Ternera, grows to maturity. He develops an unhealthy passion
for his aunt, Amaranta, which she—in her loneliness—comes dangerously
close to requiting. The two touch each other and sleep naked together
without ever having intercourse. When they are almost discovered
kissing, however, Amaranta breaks off the affair, and Aureliano
José joins the army. The official Liberal party signs a peace agreement
with the Conservative government, an agreement that Colonel Buendía
sees as treacherous. He repudiates the agreement and flees the country,
and Aureliano José goes with him. While Colonel Aureliano is traveling
throughout the Caribbean, starting Liberal uprisings, Macondo settles
into relative peace, thriving in its new status as a municipality
under the mayor José Raquél Moncada, who is a Conservative but also
a humane and intelligent man.
Aureliano José deserts the rebel army and returns home,
hoping to marry Amaranta, who continues to avoid him, repelled by
the notion of incest. The situation is brought to a tragic close
when Aureliano José is killed by a Conservative soldier during an
act of civil disobedience. Soon after Aureliano José’s desertion,
the seventeen sons whom Colonel Aureliano Buendía has fathered over
the course of his travels are brought to Macondo to be baptized,
and all are given the name Aureliano. Not long after Aureliano José’s
death, the Colonel himself returns to Macondo as the head of an
army. Tall and pale, Colonel Aureliano Buendía has been hardened
by his many battles: when a court martial orders that José Raquél Moncada
be put to death, he refuses to commute the sentence, despite the
longstanding friendship between the two soldiers and the protests
of all the town’s matriarchs.
Summary: Chapter 9
The execution of Moncada is the beginning of the end.
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, and then Colonel Aureliano Buendía himself,
lose faith in the purpose of the war. Gerineldo Márquez devotes
himself instead to Amaranta, who steadily rebuffs his protestations
of love even as she becomes more and more used to his presence.
Withdrawn into himself, Colonel Buendía becomes a shell of a man, unemotional
and utterly solitary, without any memories. It is only when Gerineldo
Márquez is condemned to death that Colonel Buendía is forced to
confront himself, finally acknowledging the emptiness of the war.
Together with the freed Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, he fights the
bloody battles against his own forces in an effort to convince the
Liberals, at last, to end the war. When he signs a peace treaty
that he feels represents the Liberal party’s failure to uphold their
ideals, he thinks that he has betrayed both himself and his party.
He attempts suicide but survives the bullet wound in his chest.
When Úrsula, his mother, sees that he will live, she makes an effort
to rejuvenate the house and to rescue it from the creeping decay
that descended on it during the war.
Analysis: Chapters 7–9
This section, describing Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s wars
and the concurrent changes in Macondo, is one of the most disturbing
in the novel. José Aureliano Buendía dies, and even the heavens
mourn his passing, miraculously raining down yellow flowers in his
memory. Death, in fact, begins to plague the Buendía family: José
Arcadio, Arcadio, and Aureliano José all die prematurely and tragically.
But perhaps the most troubling of the misfortunes that fill these
pages is the dehumanization of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Once a
sensitive man, the Colonel becomes hardened by war, losing his capacity
for emotion and even for memory. In One Hundred Years of
Solitude, miracles like the rain of flowers in honor of
José Arcadio Buendía coexist with tragedies, and no mercy is shown
to the protagonists.
