77 pages • 2 hours read
One Hundred Years of Solitude
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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
As Colonel Aureliano Buendía faces the firing squad, he thinks about the day his father, José Arcadio Buendía, took him to discover ice. The firing squad narrative serves as a frame story for a chapter that is largely about the Colonel's father. A man named Melquíades, who becomes his close friend, comes with a group of wanderers on a regular basis to the rural village of Macondo, where the Colonel grew up, bringing marvels from the outside world. (The English translation of this chapter uses the inaccurate slur "gypsy" to describe the travelers.)
The wanderers bring new scientific discoveries to the village: magnets, a telescope, an astrolabe, a compass, an alchemical laboratory, and dentures. Over time, José Arcadio Buendía becomes more and more enamored with the inventions brought by the wanderers. He spends his wife's meager inheritance to acquire each new invention. Though he was one of the village founders and developed it as an “orderly” and idyllic town, once he gets each new item, he stops caring about community projects and even his own children. His wife, Úrsula Iguarán, is frustrated that he is disengaged and not attending to any domestic duties, so she smashes his astrolabe.
José Arcadio Buendía becomes convinced that he needs to connect their rural, isolated village to the wider world so that they can access new inventions more easily. He sets out on a path through a tropical rainforest and discovers a Spanish galleon (a type of sailing ship); this convinces him that it would be nearly impossible to find the route that goes to the capital because Macondo must be a peninsula. He unpacks, with the help of his children, and this leads him to spend more time with them. He tells them fantastical stories about the world.
As the Colonel is about to be executed by firing squad, he remembers that one day, when his father was telling them one of these fantastical stories, the arrival of the travelers to town interrupted him mid-sentence. This group, larger and more active than previous ones, told him Melquíades died. José Arcadio paid them so that he and his two sons—one of whom is the Colonel—could touch a large block of ice that the men carry in a chest. He describes the ice as the "great invention of our time" (18).
Chapter 2 Summary
This chapter begins earlier than Chapter 1, before José Arcadio and Úrsula live in the village of Macondo.
When Úrsula Iguarán becomes annoyed at her husband's eccentric ideas, she curses the ancestors who migrated to her birth village, because that is where she met her husband. She and José Arcadio Buendía are cousins, and in the early years of their marriage fear birth defects because of their close genetic relationship: One family member in a prior generation was born with a pig’s tail due to incest. Úrsula's mother enhances her fear of birth defects and has Úrsula wear “chastity pants” (22) so that she and her husband cannot have sex.
One day, when José Arcadio is fighting his roosters, his opponent, Prudencio Aguilar, makes fun of him for not having sex with his wife despite a year of marriage. José Arcadio kills him by stabbing him in the throat, and when he gets home, he refuses to let Úrsula wear her chastity pants. The ghost of the man he killed haunts their house by standing around trying to stuff a handful of grass into the hole in his throat while looking sad. Along with a few other young families, José Arcadio and Úrsula decide to leave town. After a long journey, they settle on the bank of a river, found Macondo, and have three children: José Arcadio, Aureliano, and Amaranta.
Soon after the birth of Amaranta, the third child of Úrsula and José Arcadio, the travelers return to the village, this time with circus tents and a flying carpet on which they offer rides.
Pilar Ternera, a daughter of one of the other founding families, who is in a sexual and romantic relationship with young José Arcadio (the son of José Arcadio and Úrsula) tells him that she is pregnant. He gets upset and tries to have sex with one of the travelers in one of the circus tents. Two days later, he leaves with the travelers when they leave the village.
Distraught, his mother, Úrsula, wanders after him. His father searches for his wife without success, takes care of the newborn, Amaranta, and returns to his library. Five months later, Úrsula returns with news of a previously unknown village nearby as well as a route to the capital, having discovered the route that her husband couldn’t find.
Chapter 3 Summary
Pilar gives birth to a son, Arcadio. The people Úrsula brings to Macondo along with her news of the neighboring village and route to the capital make Macondo a growing commercial center. José Arcadio becomes re-invested in the future of his village. He synchronizes wooden bird clocks across town to chime simultaneously.
Aureliano, the second son, spends a great deal of time in his father's alchemical laboratory. His father worries about him and tries to spark his interest in women. Aureliano predicts that someone is coming, and Rebeca arrives. She is 11 years old and carries her parents' bones in a bag, along with an introduction letter from relatives whose names neither José Arcadio nor Úrsula recognize. Rebeca eats clay and whitewash. After a few weeks, she is folded into the family and becomes Rebeca Buendía.
Rebeca brings the insomnia plague to Macondo. At first, José Arcadio laughs off the idea, but after several weeks, he also has trouble sleeping. The entire family contracts the plague. Úrsula tries to cure it with an herbal sleeping potion, which only causes them to hallucinate. Despite their insomnia, the family members continue their business of making candy animals; this transmits the plague to the rest of the town. The town quarantines themselves. To protect against the memory loss that accompanies the plague, they paste written labels onto everyday items.
Melquíades returns to town. He died but decided to return to the world of the living. He introduces José Arcadio to the daguerreotype (an early form of photography), and he immerses himself in the process, convinced he can use it to prove the existence of God.
Úrsula expands her business into making breads and desserts. She realizes the family has grown substantially, so she builds additions onto the house. As they are building, a magistrate sent by the government arrives. He orders all houses to be painted blue, even though Úrsula wants to paint theirs white. José Arcadio Buendía confronts the magistrate and threatens him. The magistrate leaves but reappears a week later with his family. José Arcadio decides to allow the magistrate to stay because of his family, and Aureliano develops a crush on the magistrate's daughter, Remedios.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These initial chapters set up the recurring themes and events of the rest of the novel. In particular, the use of narrative time in Chapter 1 sets up a frequent pattern: Chapters in this book often begin with an event set many years in the future or in the past, and the rest of the chapter fills in the gaps in time. This pattern creates a simultaneity effect: Because events are layered one after another, it appears that they are all happening at once.
Additionally, this effect of narrative time meshes with another pattern first set up in these initial chapters: recurring character development and character traits across generations of the Buendía family. José Arcadio Buendía names his son José Arcadio, and the act of naming seems to bestow similar traits upon the child. Both men are prone to leaving town for emotional reasons and in search of what they cannot find in Macondo. These chapters also begin a recurring pattern of names for Aureliano, Arcadio, Úrsula, Amaranta, and Remedios. In each generation, people with the same name tend to have similar physical characteristics, as though they were echoes or iterations of the same character.
The image of the Spanish galleon, which José Arcadio sees in his time exploring outside Macondo, also recurs later in the text. It appears even this early in the work as a haunting, ghostly figure, a specter of Spanish colonialism despite the seeming isolation and newness of the village. The ship serves as an example of García Márquez’s use of Macondo and the surrounding region as a microcosm for Colombian history from colonization to the 20th century. Despite its remoteness, the Spaniards have already encroached on the Macondo, indicating its inevitable engagement with the outside world even before Úrsula makes her discovery. Hauntings take more personal forms in the text as well. For example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar haunts José Arcadio Buendía; his murder creates a bond between the two men that lasts until (and potentially even after) José Arcadio’s death.
The disruption of rurality and the agrarian play central roles in the text. Here, the capital is treated as an abstract, distant place—more a concept than a physical location. Many critics compare Macondo’s earliest days to the Garden of Eden and treat its development and ultimate destruction as an allegory of biblical chronology, from creation to apocalypse. The effects of modernity and progress on the town begin to emerge in these early chapters, as the patriarchs begin to fuse with outsiders. The arrival of the magistrate, with his imposition of arbitrary rules on the townspeople, indicates the beginnings of this encroachment.
Úrsula Iguarán's fear of incest forms a consistent thread throughout the text; this is first evident here when her mother sends her off to her wedding bed with a chastity belt. The fear of having a child born with the tail of a pig begins in these initial chapters, though it is fulfilled only in the book's final chapter, with the infant born to Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula.
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