Friday, August 29, 2014

Rough Map of Macondo Area

While looking at this map and re-reading the part of the book which details the Macondo region, I noticed something, which I felt conflicted with what we saw in the movie about Márquez. After tireless exploration, José Arcadio Buendía discovers that “Macondo is surrounded by water on all sides,” and exclaims, “God damn it!” This upsets José because he feels that the water fences them off from the rest of the world, that their town is trapped in its own solitude and stuck with nothing interesting. The city does become more exciting, however, as it grows. I then thought back to Márquez’s thoughts on coastal and inland cities, as revealed in the video. The way Macondo is seen at the beginning of the book matches Márquez’s idea of boring, inland cities, while later on it reflects his view of fun, coastal ones. So, in a way, Márquez defies his own feelings and rules. Márquez does this constantly with literary “rules” throughout the novel, and makes every situation unique and different from what we would expect. For example, most of us thought the book would finish with the Colonel’s death because of the first line, but that turned out to be the middle, not the end. The strange, and sometimes seemingly random, turns the story takes make the novel interesting, and I think that they are a central part of Marquez’s writing style in One Hundreds Years of Solitude. What are your thoughts on Marquez’s ability to create the unexpected?

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