One Hundred Years of Solitude: Similes 12 key examples

The narrator uses a metaphor that compares José Arcadio Buendía to a mother as he takes care of Amaranta in the temporary absence of Úrsula: 

For several weeks José Arcadio Buendía let himself be overcome by consternation. He took care of little Amaranta like a mother. He bathed and dressed her, took her to be nursed four times a day, and even sang to her at night the songs that Úrsula never knew how to sing. 

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The narrator uses a simile when describing Aureliano’s uncomfortable feelings of attraction to the pre-pubescent Remedios, daughter of Don Apolinar Moscote, enemy of José Arcadio Buendía. After José Arcadio Buendía makes a deal with Moscote, the narrator notes that: 

The soldiers left that same afternoon. A few days later José Arcadio Buendía found a house for the magistrate’s family. Everybody was at peace except Aureliano. The image of Remedios, the magistrate’s younger daughter, who, because of her age, could have been his daughter, kept paining him in some part of his body. It was a physical sensation that almost bothered him when he walked, like a pebble in his shoe.

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Shortly after Melquíades returns to Macondo and helps save the town from the amnesia sickness, Francisco the Man, a 200-year-old troubadour, sets up shop in Catarino’s store in order to sing the news he has gathered from beyond the town. In describing this scene, the narrator uses simile and allusion: 

The whole town went to listen to him to find out what had happened in the world [...] Aureliano went to Catarino’s store that night. He found Francisco the Man, like a monolithic chameleon, sitting in the midst of a circle of bystanders. He was singing the news with his old, out-of-tune voice, accompanying himself with the same archaic accordion that Sir Walter Raleigh had given him in the Guianas and keeping time with his great walking feet that were cracked from saltpeter.

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The narrator uses a simile that compares an aged and dying Melquíades to a “shade” or ghost: 

The newfound harmony was interrupted by the death of Melquíades. Although it was a foreseeable event, the circumstances were not. A few months after his return, a process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedrooms like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bothers about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed.

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An unnamed woman from Macondo uses a simile when attempting to describe a train, a new form of technology which nobody from the village has ever encountered before. After Aureliano Triste leaves behind the village, and his ice factory, in order to bring the railway to Macondo, the narrator notes that: 

“It’s coming,” she finally explained. “Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.” 
At that moment the town was shaken by a whistle with a fearful echo and a loud, panting respiration. During the previous weeks they had seen the gangs who were laying ties and tracks and no one paid attention to them because they thought it was some new trick of the gypsies, coming back with whistles and tambourines and their age-old and discredited song and dance about the qualities of some concoction put together by journeyman geniuses of Jerusalem.

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Márquez uses simile and metaphor to describe Colonel Aureliano Buendía's deep but impotent anger following the assassinations of all of his sons born during the war: 

Colonel Aureliano Buendía did not recover his calm for a long time. He abandoned the manufacture of little fishes, ate with great difficulty, and wandered all through the house as if walking in his sleep, dragging his blanket and chewing on his quiet rage. At the end of three months his hair was ashen, his old waxed mustache poured down beside his colorless lips, but, on the other hand, his eyes were once more the burning coals that had startled those who had seen him born and that in other days had made chairs rock with a simple glance.

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The narrator uses simile and metaphor to describe the complex changes brought to the Buendía family by the railroad and the influx of foreign visitors to the once-remote town of Macondo: 

Fernanda had to swallow her scruples and treat guests of the worst sort like kings as they muddied the porch with their boots, urinated in the garden, laid their mats down anywhere to take their siesta, and spoke without regard for the sensitivities of ladies or the proper behavior of gentlemen [...] Colonel Aureliano Buendía, convinced that the majority of those who came into his workshop to greet him were not doing it because of sympathy or regard but out of the curiosity to meet a historical relic, a museum fossil, decided to shut himself in by barring the door [...] 

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The narrator uses both simile and metaphor when describing some of the major social changes brought to Macondo by the introduction of the railroad: 

Ever since the railroad had been officially inaugurated [...] on the streets of Macondo men and women were seen who had adopted everyday and normal customs and manners but who really looked like people out of a circus. In a town that had chafed under the tricks of the gypsies there was no future for those ambulatory acrobats of commerce who with equal effrontery offered a whistling kettle and a daily regime that would assure the salvation of the soul on the seventh day; but from those who let themselves be convinced out of fatigue and the ones who were always unwary, they reaped stupendous benefits.

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The narrator uses a simile that compares José Arcadio Segundo to a “wandering star” when describing his distant relationship to the other members of the Buendía family: 

No one knew the details of his life. At one time it was discovered that he had no fixed abode, that he raised fighting cocks at Pilar Ternera’s house, and that sometimes he would stay there to sleep but that he almost always spent the night in the rooms of the French matrons. He drifted about, with no ties of affection, with no ambitions, like a wandering star in Úrsula’s planetary system.

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Márquez uses a simile that paradoxically suggests that Aureliano Segundo is cheating on his mistress with his wife. After he temporarily returns to his family home following his near-death at the end of his eating contest with The Elephant, Márquez writes that: 

He did recover, indeed, in less than a week, and two weeks later he was celebrating the fact of his survival with unprecedented festivities. He continued living at Petra Cotes’s but he would visit Fernanda every day and sometimes he would stay to eat with the family, as if fate had reversed the situation and had made him the husband of his concubine and the lover of his wife.

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After a stark reversal in their once good fortune, Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes discover that they both feel a new, truer form of love for one another. In his description of this new stage in their relationship, the narrator uses an oxymoron, as well as a number of similes: 

Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs. 

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When describing the financial difficulties that beset Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula while she is pregnant, the narrator uses a simile that compares intellectual gifts and erudition to worthless jewelry: 

In the lethargy of her pregnancy, Amaranta Úrsula tried to set up a business in necklaces made out of the backbones of fish. But except for Mercedes, who bought a dozen, she could not find any customers. Aureliano was aware for the first time that his gift for languages, his encyclopedic knowledge, his rare faculty for remembering the details of remote deeds and places without having been there, were as useless as the box of genuine jewelry that his wife owned, which must have been worth as much as all the money that the last inhabitants of Macondo could have put together.

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