One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez is so packed full of strange happenings, a few of which are very similar to other stories we have read in the class, such as The Memory Police and “The Great Awake.” In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rebeca brings insomnia to Macondo, which over time causes memory loss. Eventually everyone begins labeling items in order to remember what they are. The insomnia spreads to everyone in the town like a sickness, and the town attempts to isolate itself.
Isolation (or solitude, if you will,) plays a very important role within the telling of this story. Many of the characters withdraw emotionally, as well as physically throughout the story. For example, Aureliano took refuge in his work when he realized that he could not help the girl who was repaying her debts by sleeping with men. “He took refuge in his work. He resigned himself to be a womanless man for all his life in order to hide the shame of his uselessness” (Marquez 58).
Incest also seems to be a form of isolation that is a major idea that reoccurs within this story. The book starts out with two characters who are the first to introduce this to the reader, setting up the expectations for what happens repeatedly in the rest of the book. It establishes that the act of incest may lead to horrible consequences, such as a child with deformed features such as a pig’s tail. Ursula, who seems to be the only one that is concerned about this, worries about it nonstop through her pregnancy. Later on in the book, we see that some of the characters that perform the act of incest suffer or die in some horrible way (or their children do).
Overall, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a very chaotic story that reads like a warning or a fairytale (similar to “a Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”). The chaos it creates is sometimes more readable and easier to follow, and sometimes not, much like life and how chaotic and complex it can be.