One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a classic in world literature. The text itself focuses on the Buendia family, which starts with Jose Arcadia Buendia and his cousin Ursala, who marry without their family’s blessing and eventually leave to found the city of Macando—the mystical place that their family will inhabit and run for the next 100 years.
At the beginning of the novel, the town of Macondo is sleepy and more magic than modern. It is visited by gypsies who can do magic and bring mystical objects that don’t conform to what we know about reality—these gypsies are the only insight the town gets to the outside world for many of the early years of its existence. Throughout the book, the town moves more towards reality and modernity as time moves on—the family, growing closer to modernity and depravity, slowly forgets themselves and the lessons they have passed down through the generations.
The banana plantation—an analogy for the United Fruit Company in real life—comes to Macondo after the civil war between the liberals and conservatives. The plantation is brought to Macondo by the American government and stands in for the imperialism that Colombia faced in the early 1900s. The plantation itself is presented at first as being a positive part of the city, and Jose Arcadio Segundo is the foreman of the plant. He, along with many of the other workers, eventually comes to despise the terrible working conditions. They plan to organize and strike against the company when they are invited to a meeting.
At the meeting, 3,000 people are slaughtered for attempting to strike. Jose Arcadio Segundo passes out and is one of the only people to survive. When he wakes up, the novel describes what he sees of the massacre:
There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle. Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the corpses had the same temperature as plaster in autumn and the same consistency of petrified foam that it had (chapter 15).
After the massacre occurs, the bodies of the dead are piled onto a train to be disposed of in the sea like “rejected bananas.”
The massacre is then added to the list of things that people forget. Jose Arcadio Segundo, eventually the sole survivor and witness to the slaughter, returns to a Macondo that believes the official communication put out by the government—that no one died, and that the conditions at the plantation will be better. The agreement is never signed, the plantation eventually leaves, and no one remembers the 3,000 people who died—except Jose Arcadio Segundo. The knowledge and isolation caused by his witness to the events eventually lead to self-imposed exile with the goal of remembering the victims of the massacre.
The story of Jose Arcadio Segundo and the analogy drawn to the United Fruit Company’s massacre of 3,000 actual citizens in Colombia in 1928 make a clear statement about the theme of memory in the novel. Jose Arcadio Segundo is a witness and knows the truth, but the lie put out by the government and plantation owners effectively erases and rewrites history. Everyone, even his own family, believes the story of the government. The erasure of memory, forgetting the actual events that happen, shows the danger of moving too far beyond the witnesses who have lived the experiences. The modern world has no true collective memory because propaganda and misinformation take the place of truth and that which is passed on by eyewitnesses. Ultimately, the isolation and seeming madness of Jose Arcadio Segundo prove the dangers of imperialism and the ability of people in positions of power to rewrite history, taking advantage of those who have no power.
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