Thursday, August 23, 2012
Ursula and her obsession over pig tails...
As I was progressing through the book, I repeatedly read about Ursula concerning over her children or descendants growing pig tails because of the incest that started the family, and the continued incest throughout the family. I started to wonder if she would ever be right (later I found out she was in the end). After continuously reading about kids being born without pig tails I started thinking that maybe the "pig tails" in question were metaphorical. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that maybe the fate of the family and how things happened with them was the "pig tail". For instance, the mistakes the men in the family continually make and how that eventually leads to the downfall of the family and the town as a whole is the major "pig tail" in my mind. After thinking about this possibility for a while it started to make because Marquez's work is soo full of metaphors, so why can't the "pig tail" be another. This was all before I found out that Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano Babilonia had a kid with a literal pig tail, so maybe I'm wrong.
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2 comments:
I believe that Marquez used the metaphor of the "pigs tail" in both a literal and metaphorical sense. He wrote about a child being born with an actual pigs tail, like you said, and he also had the pigs tail represent all the mistakes that each one of the family members continues to make. The pigs tail is very curly and twisty, and that also means it's spiraling in a circular motion, just like the aspect of time in the novel. I also found that the legend of the pigs tail started with Ursula Buendía and ended with Amaranta Ursula, so I thought this was very clever on Máquez's part.
I have talked to some of you guys about this but something that I saw while studying that I thought was pretty good was how Ursula was the original Buendia who was most concerned with having a child with the tail of a pig even though she didn't. And it wasn't until the very end of the novel that we see a child finally born with the tail of a pig and it happened to be by Amaranta Ursula, the only other Ursula in the book. ALSO the father of the Aureliano (the one with the tail) was Aureliano (Babilona) who had incest with his aunt (Amaranta Ursula) and so did another Aureliano (Jose maybe)(I don't have my book at the moment). So there is the obvious repetition of patterns and the Buendia family coming full circle, all within one incident.
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