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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