100 Years of Solitude [Day 1]

1. character: Jose Arcadio Buendia

I thought Jose Arcadio Buendia was one of the most interesting characters in the first five chapters of the novel. He was constantly changing from a madman into a sane man, until he ended up as a lunatic. I thought Jose AB was the Don Quijote of this story. He was constantly being disillusioned by his madness, as was Don Quijote. As Don Quijote is tricked and brought home at the end of the first part of the novel, Jose AB is tied up to a tree and left outside towards the end of the first five chapters.

When the Gypsies first come to Maconda, in the first chapter of the story, Jose AB has the same fascination with their magnets and magnifying glasses as Don Quijote has with the knight errantry of his books. "Jose Arcadio Buendia, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth" (pg 2). Once the Gypsies leave, Jose AB takes up alchemy and the process of making gold, using the supplies that Melquiades gave him. The town is convinced Jose has lost his mind, just as Don Quijote's friends are convinced he has lost his mind. After the Gypsies leave, Jose AB fails in his attempt to find a passage to the north, and Ursula leaves him. He loses his madness and comes back to reality, becoming a mother for Amaranta and taking care of the house. When Ursula returns, however, he returns to his madness, and dusts off his old laboratory.

In chapter 4, Jose Arcadio Buendia starts his downward spiral. He takes apart the pianola to see its inner workings, but cannot reassemble it correctly in time for the party. Once Melquiades dies, however, it is the end of Jose AB's sanity. Prudencio Aguilar's spirit visits Jose AB, and his memory causes him to lose sleep. Finally, Jose AB loses it and "...grabbed the bar from a door and with the savage violence of his uncommon strength he smashed to dust the equipment in the alchemy laboratory, the daguerrotype room, the silver workshop, shouting like a man possessed in some high-sounding and fluent but completely incomprehensible language...Ten men were needed to get him down, fourteen to tie him up, twenty to drag him to the chestnut tree in the courtyard, where they left him tied up, barking in the strange language and giving off a green froth at the mouth...Later on they built him a shelter of palm branches to protect him from the sun and the rain" (pg 78). This is similar to the end of Part I of Don Quijote. He is forced home by his friends, and left there delirious and unaware of his surroundings.

I think that Jose Arcadio Buendia represents, like Don Quijote, the conflict of madness and reality in the novel. Jose AB's sanity is so tainted by his love for experimentation that in the end he obsessively and maniacally recites Melquiade's Latin chants, and gets tied to a tree like an animal.


2. theme/symbol: love

I think that love is a strongly recurring theme in the first five chapters of the novel. Everyone, at one point or another in the first chapters, professes their love or harbors a love for someone else. Jose Arcadio 'loves' Pilar Ternera, Aureliano loves Remedios, Rebeca and Amaranta both love Pietro Crespi, and Rebeca loves Jose Arcadio. As Rebeca and Amaranta fight over Pietro, Aureliano wishes to marry Remedios, who is still a bed-wetting child, and Jose Arcadio Buendia states "'Love is a disease'..." (pg 68).

Amorous love, however, is not the only kind of love in the first few chapters. There is also the maternal love that Ursula has for her children and Rebeca and Arcadio, and the paternal love Jose Arcadio Buendia feels for the town of Macondo. Ursula takes in Arcadio and Rebeca, even though they are not her children, and raises them with the same maternal kindness that she gives her own children. When Remedios, dies, Ursula orders an extended and extreme period of mourning. "Ursula ordered a mourning period of closed doors and windows, with no one entering or leaving except on matters of utmost necessity. She prohibited any talking aloud for a year and she put Remedios' daguerrotype in the place where her body had been laid out, with a black ribbon around it and an oil lamp that was always kept lighted" (pg 88). Jose Arcadio Buendia also feels a strong love for the town he established, until he goes crazy. He has organized it in such a way that everyone has access to the water, and there is always a constant state of peace in the town. When he has a dispute with Don Moscote, he does not use violence but instead handles the situation with a strange sort of calmness. He has built the town from the ground up, and has a special connection with it.

I think this theme comments on what we have read so far. I think that love can be considered a driving force behind many of the actions undertaken by the characters in the story. Jose Arcadio Buendia has a love for knowledge, which causes him to undertake alchemy. Aureliano loves Remedios, which causes him to teach her and wait for her to mature so he can marry her. He also has a sort of love for the Liberal party, seeing as he takes up the cause after the tampered-with elections, and stages a revolt against the Conservative soldiers in his town.