One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Flashbacks 1 key example

Key Examples in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapter 1 
Explanation and Analysis—The Firing Squad:

Throughout the novel, the narrator foreshadows a later incident in which Aureliano Buendía, having served as a rebel leader in a bloody civil war, faces a firing squad. This repetitive foreshadowing begins in the very first lines of the novel: 

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.