One Hundred Years of Solitude

Plot Overview

More than a century goes by over the course of the book,and so most of the events that García Márquez describes are themajor tuing points in the lives of the Buendías: births, deaths,marriages, love affairs. Some of the Buendía men are wild and sexuallyrapacious, frequenting brothels and taking lovers. Others are quietand solitary, preferring to shut themselves up in their rooms tomake tiny golden fish or to pore over ancient manuscripts. Thewomen, too, range from the outrageously outgoing, like Meme, whoonce brings home seventy-two friends from boarding school, to the primand proper Feanda del Carpio, who wears a special nightgown witha hole at the crotch when she consummates her marriage with herhusband.

A sense of the family’s destiny for greatness remainsalive in its tenacious matriarch, Ursula Iguarán, and she worksdevotedly to keep the family together despite its differences. Butfor the Buendía family, as for the entire village of Macondo, thecentrifugal forces of modeity are devastating. Imperialist capitalismreaches Macondo as a banana plantation moves in and exploits theland and the workers, and the Americans who own the plantation settlein their own fenced-in section of town. Eventually, angry at theinhumane way in which they are treated, the banana workers go onstrike. Thousands of them are massacred by the army, which sideswith the plantation owners. When the bodies have been dumped intothe sea, five years of ceaseless rain begin, creating a flood thatsends Macondo into its final decline. As the city, beaten down byyears of violence and false progress, begins to slip away, the Buendíafamily, too, begins its process of final erasure, overcome by nostalgiafor bygone days. The book ends almost as it began: the village isonce again solitary, isolated. The few remaining Buendía familymembers tu in upon themselves incestuously, alienated from theoutside world and doomed to a solitary ending. In the last sceneof the book, the last surviving Buendía translates a set of ancientprophecies and finds that all has been predicted: that the villageand its inhabitants have merely been living out a preordained cycle,incorporating great beauty and great, tragic sadness.

http://www.sparknotes.com