Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, A Look Back

Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian writer and is considered one of the greatest authors of all time. His work One Hundred Years of Solitude landed him a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, and to this day, remains one of the most important political commentaries in Latin American literature.

It explores the history of Latin America through the fictional town of Macondo. Central to the story is the Buendía family, the founders of Macondo and a family that has a knack for repeating the previous generation’s mistakes.

Each generation makes a tragic mistake that sets a domino effect of a mess for the next generation to either fix or worsen. García Márquez uses the magical realism genre to create unique surrealist metaphors like ghosts, strange prophecies and floating women.

The developments of the village of Macondo are told through imagery and symbolic moments that reference historical marks in the history of humanity and Colombia, like the beginnings of alchemy, the Age of Enlightenment, colonization and the Industrial Revolution. The nameless war in the book led by Coronel Aureliano Buendía’s rebellion against the government and the Catholic Church is a direct reference to the Colombian “Thousands Day War,” in which the Liberal Party went against the government led by the National Party. 

A quote by American anthropologist Ernest Becker perfectly summarizes the idea behind the bizarre, semi-realistic occurrences of the book: “Everything that men do is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.” The irony of magical realism is precisely that it emphasizes the absurdist aspects of the characters’ desires. Ultimately, all their efforts to satisfy the Buendía’s grueling feeling of emptiness are at risk of being in vain.

Through the Buendía family, García Márquez highlights how actions motivated by the wrong intent eventually lead to their demise. Oftentimes while trying to prevent tragic prophecies or trying to elevate their stations, the Buendías would do exactly as predicted. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude is an acclaimed masterpiece that proposes a magical realist’s take on humanity’s trajectory and nature. Márquez references key moments of Colombia’s history with a unique mysticism that makes One Hundred Years of Solitude, an immersive and thought-provoking read.

Is history a chain of mistakes condemned to repeat itself unless someone chooses to learn from it and break it? Was the downfall of Macondo the morally bankrupt Buendías, outside exploiters or a fusion of both? And what can we as readers learn from this cautionary tale?

It is these questions and more that have solidified One Years of Solitude as a classic in magical realist literature. It takes complex questions of the real world and explores them in a way that is not constricted by the rules of reality. It is the kind of novel that everyone should read at one point in their life.