Thursday, September 3, 2015
Meme's Solitude
I really liked what we did in class today so I just wanted to elaborate on it some more by describing how these different characters that we discussed become solitary. One that I found especially interesting was Meme because I don't think that her solitude is truly her fault. Her and her mother don't really get along from the start. Although she has a better relationship with her father, he doesn't even live with her; he lives with Petra Cotes because even he doesn't get along with Fernanda. As she grows up, she falls in love with a boy and proceeds to meet with him secretly. As you may remember, once her mother finds out about her meetings with him (in the bathroom, especially), she lies and says that he is coming every night to steal her chickens and has him shot. He is yet another person that Meme loses a relationship with. After this event, Meme refuses to speak to anybody and her mother, Fernanda, sends her away to a boarding school, isolating her from all of the people she's ever known. Then, in the boarding school, her child (from her lover that her mother shot) is taken from her and brought back to Fernanda. Throughout the book she in some way loses everyone that ever meant anything to her.
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I also enjoyed class to day, and would like to mention Fernanda as a solitary character as well! At the very end of class I was flipping through my book when I noticed a quote I had marked by Fernanda. I had marked this quote because it was over a two-page long run on sentence! This sentence begins on page 323 near the bottom, and goes on to page 325. (It is too long to post) In this quote, Fernanda reaches her breaking point, complaining that no one understands her. She lists all the horrible things that they have said about her, including how she acts better than everyone else. She believes that she was raised to be a queen, and she lives her life in continuous disappointment because that is not the way she ended up. She tries to act superior to everyone by maintaining strict rules throughout the house and even using a golden chamber pot trying to compensate for her lost childhood dream. Her attitude towards everyone else makes her solitary, as she is accepting of no one, and in return, no one is able to accept her. No one really understands her, as they have all grown up in Macondo and have very different values then those of Fernanda’s and her parents.
In discussing the solitary characters in the novel, i really enjoy the dynamic between Jose Arcardio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. They played the switching name game so often that eventually everyone around them (and maybe themselves) lost sight of who was who. They two had no identities and eventually were only left with each other. They were almost the same person and only were left with each other, ergo they were alone. In turn both experience d solitude because the only other person they could be with was themselves. After growing up and separating they lost their identities and the only thing that they had in common was their solitude.
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