Previous
Similes
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—The Philosopher's Stone:
In an ironic scene, Márquez alludes to the philosopher’s stone, a mythical alchemical substance:
José Arcadio Buendía received his errant son with joy and initiated him in the search for the philosopher’s stone, which he had finally undertaken. One afternoon the boys grew enthusiastic over the flying carpet that went swiftly by the laboratory at window level [...] “Let them dream,” he said. “We’ll do better flying than they are doing, and with more scientific resources than a miserable bedspread.” In spite of his feigned interest, José Arcadio never understood the powers of the philosopher’s egg, which to him looked like a poorly blown bottle.
After José Arcadio learns that he has impregnated Pilar Ternera, he withdraws from her company and feigns interest in his father’s projects in alchemy in order to distract himself. In his alchemy lab, José Arcadio Buendía works on developing the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance which was said to turn base metals into stone and even create an elixir of life which would confer immortality. This allusion to alchemy, then, places José Arcadio Buendía somewhere between a magician and a scientist. However, this allusion is also deeply ironic. José Arcadio Buendía dismisses the flying carpet as a mere trifle, preferring instead his own “scientific” project. However, his experiments have little to do with science, and he is never able to successfully create the stone.
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Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—His Worst Enemy:
In a heavily ironic scene, José Arcadio Buendía is reunited with the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom he murdered before leaving Riohacha. When José Arcadio Buendía sees the figure of an elderly man in his room one night, the narrator notes that:
It was Prudencio Aguilar. When he finally identified him, startled that the dead also aged, José Arcadio Buendía felt himself shaken by nostalgia. “Prudencio,” he exclaimed. “You’ve come from a long way off!” After many years of death the yearning for the living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the nearness of that other death which exists within death, that Prudencio Aguilar had ended up loving his worst enemy. He had spent a great deal of time looking for him.
In life, José Arcadio Buendía and Prudencio were far from friends. When word spread that José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula, who were cousins, had not consummated their marriage in order to prevent the prophesied birth of children with animal features, Prudencio publicly accuses José Arcadio Buendía of impotence, leading José Arcadio Buendía to shoot and kill him the next day. After being haunted by the ghost of Prudencio, José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula leave Riohacha to found Macondo.
Now, however, the two former enemies look upon each other as close friends. The narrator notes that, ironically, Prudencio “had ended up loving his worst enemy,” searching for him across the region after leaving Riohacha. Due to the loneliness of death and old age, the two men are now pleased to see each other and spend a good deal of time in each other's company during the later years of José Arcadio Buendía’s life.
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Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Armor :
The narrator uses a metaphor that compares a heavy and elaborate wedding dress to “armor.” After Amaranta fails in various attempts to sabotage Rebeca’s marriage to Pietro Crespi, the narrator notes that:
That afternoon, while Rebeca was suffocating with heat inside the armor of thread that Amparo Moscote was putting about her body with thousands of pins and infinite patience, Amaranta made several mistakes in her crocheting and pricked her finger with the needle, but she decided with frightful coldness that the date would be the last Friday before the wedding and the method would be a dose of laudanum in her coffee.
As Amparo Moscote, one of Don Apolinar Moscote’s many daughters, shapes the wedding dress to Rebeca’s body, the narrator describes Rebecca as “suffocating with heat inside the armor of thread.” This metaphor imagines the wedding dress as a heavy suit of armor, highlighting both its severe formality and its great weight. There is also a sense of irony to this comparison. Due to Amaranta’s vow to stop the wedding at any cost, Rebeca is, in some sense, going to war with her adopted sister. However, no armor could protect her from the poison that Amaranta has decided to use.
Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Simpler Times:
Situational irony permeates Márquez’s depiction of the final days of the war, during which Aureliano reflects cynically upon how little progress has been made despite the great sacrifice of time, resources, and lives. As he reflects upon his order to execute Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, and his mother’s threat to kill him with her own bare hands if he carries out the execution, Aureliano’s thoughts turn towards his own life:
During that interminable night [...] Colonel Aureliano Buendía scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude. His only happy moments, since that remote afternoon when his father had taken him to see ice, had taken place in his silver workshop where he passed the time putting little gold fishes together. He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dung heap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late.
The narrator’s language emphasizes the sad ironies of the war. Aureliano has become a powerful and prominent figure during the war, leading armies, receiving honors, and executing his enemies with the stroke of a pen. However, he does not experience the feelings of contentment, satisfaction, or security that one might expect to accompany power. Instead, he notes that he was happier before the war, in simpler times, such as when he would work in his silver workshop, “putting little gold fishes together.” These reflections cement Aureliano’s disillusionment at this point in the novel, as well as his desire to put a quick end to the war.
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Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Pact with Solitude :
When describing Aureliano’s life after the war and the solitary habits which he begins to develop after becoming profoundly disillusioned with humanity, the narrator personifies the concept of solitude:
Taciturn, silent, insensible to the new breath of vitality that was shaking the house, Colonel Aureliano Buendía could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. He would get up at five in the morning after a light sleep, have his eternal mug of bitter coffee in the kitchen, shut himself up all day in the workshop, and at four in the afternoon he would go along the porch dragging a stool, not even noticing the fire of the rosebushes [...] and he would sit in the street door as long as the mosquitoes would allow him to.
Here, the narrator describes Aureliano as making an “honorable pact with solitude,” as if solitude were a human figure who could be negotiated or bargained with. There is a particular irony to this act of personification, as Aureliano has signed numerous pacts and deals with other parties as leader of the rebel faction in the civil war. Now, he simply wishes to put the war behind him and to be left alone, but even this desired solitude is imagined by the narrator as yet another "pact."
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Chapter 12
Explanation and Analysis—Remedios's Beauty :
Throughout the middle chapters of the novel, Remedios the Beauty is wholly unaware of the effect that she has on men. Because she is uninterested in her appearance, Remedios’s modest beauty is treated as ironic by the novel. This sense of situational irony is apparent in Remedios’s characteristic response to her family’s attempts to pressure her to maintain propriety:
They bothered her so much to cut the rain of hair that already reached to her thighs and to make rolls with combs and braids with red ribbons that she simply shaved her head and used the hair to make wigs for the saints. The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion in a search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she became to men.
When her family pressured Remedios to cut her long and wild hair, she simply “shaved her head” in order to “make wigs” for the dolls and figurines of saints around the house. The narrator notes the “startling” fact that her disinterest in her appearance makes her, ironically, all the more attractive to men. “The more she did away with fashion,” the narrator notes, “the more provocative she became to men.” The men in Macondo, then, regard her disinterest in maintaining her appearance as a provocation or challenge to them.
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