The Past

As George Santayana once said, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Buendia family's primary problem is that they have forgotten the past and are now "doomed to repeat it." Because the prohibition of incest ended with Ursula's death, and the children had forgotten to remember their pasts, history repeated itself. All of history can therefore be viewed as a cycle that repeats itself ad infinitum. However, unlike the myth of eternal return, in the present and future, we can look at our past selves if we remember what our past selves did and instead of being stuck in an eternal return, we can change our futures and hopefully break our cycles so as to not end up like the Buendia family.