One Hundred Years of Solitude

In his depiction of José Arcadio Buendía’s attempt to build a memory device which would include all possible information, Márquez satirizes science, and more specifically, the scientific desire to master the world through knowledge. After the insomnia illness spreads through Macondo, the narration gains a satirical edge as José Arcadio Buendía attempts to solve the problem of memory-loss: 

The artifact was based on the possibility of reviewing every morning, from beginning to end, the totality of knowledge acquired during one’s life. He conceived of it as a spinning dictionary that a person placed on the axis could operate by means of a lever, so that in very few hours there would pass before his eyes the notions most necessary for life. He had succeeded in writing almost fourteen thousand entries [...]

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Márquez uses an extended metaphor that compares dealing with government bureaucracy to warfare in a highly satirical passage. The narrator describes Colonel Aureliano Buendía's frustrations in attempting to secure the pension promised to him and the other soldiers by the government: 

After the armistice of Neerlandia, while Colonel Aureliano Buendía took refuge with his little gold fishes, he kept in touch with the rebel officers who had been faithful to him until the defeat. With them he waged the sad war of daily humiliation, of entreaties and petitions, of come-back-tomorrow, of anytime-now, of we’re-studying-your-case-with-the-proper-attention; the war hopelessly lost against the many yours-most-trulys who should have signed and would never sign the lifetime pensions. The other war, the bloody one of twenty years, did not cause them as much damage as the corrosive war of eternal postponements.

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Márquez satirizes the white American “gringos” who travel through Latin America for tourism and business through his parodic depiction of Mr. Herbert, a hot air balloon entrepreneur who plans to exploit the distinct striped bananas of Macondo. As Mr. Herbert sits down at the Buendía family home to eat, the narrator states that: 

When they brought to the table the tiger-striped bunch of bananas that they were accustomed to hang in the dining room during lunch, he picked the first piece of fruit without great enthusiasm. [When] he finished the first bunch he asked them to bring him another. Then he took a small case with optical instruments out of the toolbox that he always carried with him. With the suspicious attention of a diamond merchant he examined the banana meticulously, dissecting it with a special scalpel, weighing the pieces on a pharmacist’s scale, and calculating its breadth with a gunsmith’s calipers. 

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