Memory in One Hundred Years of Solitude

"Memory is a living thing […] all that is remembered joins, and lives--the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead."

~Eudora Welty 

This quote serves as an epigraph for Sing, Unburied, Sing, but it just as easily could be applied to One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the novel, characters also suffer from seeing ghosts, like the characters in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The ghost of Prudencio Aguilar is a literal "living" memory of a violent deed that haunts Jose Arcadio Buendia; he connects the events of the past with the people of the present. 

Furthermore, memory in general serves as a link between the generations. Ursula, the matriarch of the family, is the glue that holds the Buendias together. She has been around the longest and has seen her sons leave Macondo for years and return, her grandson become a tyrant, her great-grandson build a railroad, and so on. She remembers it all, and her memories tie her descendants to their ancestors of the past. Later on in the novel especially, Ursula forms bonds with her many greats-grandchildren by telling them stories of her ancestors. With her memory, she bonds the living of the present (the children) with the dead of the past (their deceased ancestors). The act of storytelling binds the oldest woman in town with her youngest family members. Memory is the essential connection the Buendias must have to survive as a family, just as Welty reveals in her quote.