Okay, so i fixed my spacebar(sorry for that cheesy joke), but more importantly I have some comments about the magical realism presented in "100 Years Of Solitude". (should that be in quotes or some other citation?) I feel like a lot of the magical realism from the novel can be found centered around death. A few examples of this are: Melquiades and Jose Arcardio Bendia's ability to come back to the Bendias as a ghost, when Remedios the Beauty manages to float right up to heaven, when the last Aureliano is carried away by ants after his mother dies during child birth (he also has the tail of the pig,) when death told Amarata that she would die when she finished her shroud, and there are obviously other examples that I am leaving out but I just wanted to cite a few. Something that goes hand in hand with my previous point is the age of Ursula because she simply refused to die, I'm not sure how old she is or if it mentions it in the book but I feel like she was much older than she should have been, especially given the time period in which she lived. I'm not quite sure how I am supposed to sum up my blog post or if this is even worthy of being called that, but I have to start somewhere.
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Expanding on that, maybe Ursula's refusal to die and lack of magical realist occurrences adds to her being, in my opinion, the most grounded and logical character in the book. In a way, she didn't want to give in to the frivolity that came with death, which kept her holding the family together for five generations. She witnessed the magical realism in the death of others, but never allowed it to affect her own well-being or mortality (or immortality.)
I do remember reading in the book somewhere that Ursula did live well past one hundred years old. As Madeline said, I also agree that Ursula is the most grounded and logical character in the book. I feel as if Ursula could see all along the fate of the Buendias. It is not until the end of the book when Jose Arcadio Segundo is reading the manuscripts that he realizes the fate of the Buendia family. Jose Arcadio Segundo is at this point basically reading the same novel that we are. I wonder if the rest of the Buendias would have valued Ursula's opinion and logic earlier on in the novel if it would have ended differently. Maybe there would not have been such a tragic downfall of the Buendia family. Ursula lived to be so old for a reason, maybe it was her attempt to save the family from the tragic downfall she foresaw.
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