100 years of solitude book report

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Okay, first, a few ground rules for this summary. One Hundred Years of Solitude jumps back and forth in time so much it makes our heads spin.

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Summary, Characters & Themes

SparkNotes is here for you with everything you need to ace or teach! Find out more. For years, the town has no contact with the outside world, except for gypsies who occasionally visit, peddling technologies like ice and telescopes.

He remains a leader who is also deeply solitary, alienating himself from other men in his obsessive investigations into mysterious matters. These character traits are inherited by his descendents throughout the novel. His younger child, Aureliano, inherits his intense, enigmatic focus. Gradually, the village loses its innocent, solitary state when it establishes contact with other towns in the region.

Later, a mayor is appointed, and his reign is peaceful until another civil uprising has him killed. After his death, the civil war ends with the signing of a peace treaty. Others are quiet and solitary, preferring to shut themselves up in their rooms to make tiny golden fish or to pore over ancient manuscripts.

The women, too, range from the outrageously outgoing, like Meme, who once brings home seventy-two friends from boarding school, to the prim and proper Fernanda del Carpio, who wears a special nightgown with a hole at the crotch when she consummates her marriage with her husband. Imperialist capitalism reaches Macondo as a banana plantation moves in and exploits the land and the workers, and the Americans who own the plantation settle in their own fenced-in section of town.

Eventually, angry at the inhumane way in which they are treated, the banana workers go on strike. Thousands of them are massacred by the army, which sides with the plantation owners. When the bodies have been dumped into the sea, five years of ceaseless rain begin, creating a flood that sends Macondo into its final decline.

The book ends almost as it began: the village is once again solitary, isolated. Artboard Created with Sketch. Error Created with Sketch. Themes Motifs Symbols Key Facts. Important Quotations Explained. Summary Plot Overview. Next section Chapters 1—2. Popular pages: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Take a Study Break.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel by Gabriel García Márquez that was first published in Summary. Read a Plot Overview. An introduction to and summary of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

Author's Note: One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a typical novel in that there is no single plot and no single timeline. The author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez , has crucial thematic reasons for the unusual construction of the novel. It is his intention to show that history moves not only in cycles but also in circles. For this reason, there is no single main character in focus, nor does the novel follow a regular timeline. In his quest to show how history moves in circles, Marquez gives virtually every member of the Buendia family one of the following names: men Jose Arcadio , Aureliano women Ursula, Amaranta , Remedios.

For the sake of convenience, these CliffsNotes have numbered the sections 1 through

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Reading group: One Hundred Years of Solitude is our book for May

The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the s and s, [1] which was stylistically influenced by Modernism European and North American and the Cuban Vanguardia Avant-Garde literary movement. Since it was first published in May in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 37 languages and sold more than 50 million copies. Upon awakening, he decides to establish Macondo at the riverside; after days of wandering the jungle, his founding of Macondo is utopic. For years the town is solitary and unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual visit of a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople technology such as magnets , telescopes , and ice. Ultimately he is driven insane, speaking only in Latin , and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years until his death.

One Hundred Years of Solitude Summary

As a member, you'll also get unlimited access to over 79, lessons in math, English, science, history, and more. Plus, get practice tests, quizzes, and personalized coaching to help you succeed. Already registered? Log in here for access. Log in or sign up to add this lesson to a Custom Course. Log in or Sign up. Dori has taught college and high school English courses, and has Masters degrees in both literature and education. Though Marquez was a successful journalist, this was his first novel.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude Summary

Along with the midgets and fairies, one can expect marvelous feats and moral portents, but not much humor and almost certainly no sex. The idea, it would seem, is to forget the earth. At least that is one idea of enchantment. Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life:. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. Near the end of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" a character finds a parchment manuscript in which the history of his family had been recorded "one hundred years ahead of time" by an old gypsy. The writer "had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant. It is not easy to describe the techniques and themes of the book without making it sound absurdly complicated, labored and almost impossible to read. In fact, it is none of these things.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

This month, One Hundred Years of Solitude will have been under way for Is there anyone alive now who relishes the prospect of reading another magical realist novel? There are few things more likely to make me start scanning the available exits than a writer earnestly brandishing a 1,page manuscript about spirit journeys, ghost wrestling and people whose arms turn into rose bushes whose eyes reveal the black pools of infinity and if only you dive into their dark waters … you know the sort of thing. There are some beautiful and funny and wise magical-realist books: chief among them, One Hundred Years of Solitude. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. Naturally, there are also detractors. If you do dare to decode the book and have suggestions about themes that we could consider over the next few weeks, please post them here.