One Hundred Years of Solitude

by

Gabriel García Márquez

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Themes and Colors
The Circularity of Time Theme Icon
Solitude Theme Icon
Progress and Civilization Theme Icon
Propriety, Sexuality, and Incest Theme Icon
Magic vs. Reality Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Solitude Theme Icon

Despite the vast number of characters and the many communities depicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude, solitude is a characteristic that marks each character in its own way. The males of the Buendía family (particularly those named Aureliano) are repeatedly described as having a solitary nature. Though the Aurelianos are characterized as withdrawn, the José Arcadio characters also note their loneliness, especially when in the company of others. Though solitude is portrayed as a characteristic determined by fate, Márquez suggests that the loneliest characters suffer from the negative effects of a community that forces its members to do what’s expected of them, rather than being allowed to more truthfully follow their passions.

José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch of the family, is perhaps the most literal example of this community-imposed solitude, since his natural eccentricities make him an outcast from his community. For example, out of natural curiosity and ambition, he tries to innovate new ways of using the technologies Melquíades brings to town, but the community considers him to be insane for these pursuits, and they condemn him to spending the rest of his life alone, tied to a tree in the courtyard. When José Arcadio Buendía begins speaking gibberish, the townspeople find this further evidence of his insanity, but a priest visits and reveals that the man is speaking Latin. This embodies the way in which José Arcadio Buendía is not crazy, but rather misunderstood. When José Arcadio Buendía is invited back into the house at the end of his life, he prefers to return to the tree, that position of solitude now more comfortable for him than the bustling house with the rest of his family. In this way, the community forcefully imposed the solitude on this first male of the family until he was insistent on maintaining his own solitude, which sets a precedent for all of the males to come.

While José Arcadio Buendía’s solitude seems imposed on him by the community, other characters’ solitude seems part of their nature. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, for instance, is a loner from the start, “silent and withdrawn” even before being born. This is fitting, since he’s the first baby born in the isolated town of Macondo. Despite being a loner, Colonel Aureliano Buendía is community-minded: he fights for Macondo throughout his life, but it is in this context that his community deserts him. Through his various political evolutions, different political parties (which are forms of community) come to reject him and even violently rebel against him, leaving him, ultimately, in exile—forgotten by most people in Macondo, despite his historic political and military importance.

José Arcadio Segundo, the great-grandson of José Arcadio Buendía, is also isolated by the knowledge he possesses. When he takes the initiative to lead a strike against the banana company, he is the lone survivor of the battle and is met with disbelief when he tries to share what happened during the strike. While José Arcadio Segundo attempted to shed the solitary nature of his predecessors by building a community of workers fighting for their rights, after the massacre (and its public denial), he is forced to detach from the town, since he cannot participate in the consensus reality that the massacre did not occur.

Many characters of the novel also experience isolation and loneliness because social norms force them into solitude or unfulfilling relationships. Aureliano’s very existence is kept secret by his grandmother because of his illegitimacy, which isolates him from others and cultivates in him the desire to stay home even once he is allowed the freedom to leave the house. Furthermore, Amaranta’s refusal to marry Pietro Crespi and then Colonel Gerineldo Márquez shows her way of imposing solitude on herself, and also on the men she spurns, as an act of both contrition and vengeance. She wants to punish herself for possibly willing the death of Remedios Moscote, but she also wants her suitors to suffer for not having chosen her sooner. Likewise, Rebeca is left in solitude, alone in her home, when her husband is inexplicably shot, disowned by the family because of the impropriety of having married her adopted brother. Years later, when she is offered help, she refuses it, having grown accustomed to the solitude that was initially forced on her.

Finally, Pilar Ternera and Petra Cotes, who are the mistresses of many of the Buendía men, remain their mistresses rather than becoming their wives: the Buendías maintain the ruse of being happily married in unfulfilling relationships, while secretly visiting the women they love who are less respected by society. Rather than following their hearts, the Buendía men adhere to social standards that require their relations with these women to be kept secret. Throughout the book, then, solitude seems less determined by fate and personality than by the community, which forces characters into their detachment from society, a condition that grows comfortable and irreversible over time.

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Solitude Quotes in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Below you will find the important quotes in One Hundred Years of Solitude related to the theme of Solitude.
Chapter 1  Quotes

“We will not leave,” she said. “We will stay here, because we have had a son here.”

“We still have not had a death,” he said. “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”

Úrsula replied with a soft firmness:

“If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die.”

Related Characters: José Arcadio Buendía, Úrsula Iguarán
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3  Quotes

In the meantime, Melquíades had printed on his plates everything that was printable in Macondo, and he left the daguerreotype laboratory to the fantasies of José Arcadio Buendía, who had resolved to use it to obtain scientific proof of the existence of God. Through a complicated process of superimposed exposures taken in different parts of the house, he was sure that sooner or later he would get a daguerreotype of God, if He existed, or put an end once and for all to the supposition of His existence.

Related Characters: José Arcadio Buendía, Melquíades
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4  Quotes

On the next day, Wednesday, José Arcadio Buendía went back to the workshop. “This is a disaster,” he said. “Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too.”

Related Characters: José Arcadio Buendía
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6  Quotes

“Don’t be simple, Crespi.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t marry you even if I were dead.”

Pietro Crespi lost control of himself. He wept shamelessly, almost breaking his fingers with desperation, but he could not break her down. “Don’t waste your time,” was all that Amaranta said. “If you really love me so much, don’t set foot in this house again.”

Related Characters: Amaranta, Pietro Crespi
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

As soon as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sounds of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

“Holy Mother of God!” Úrsula shouted.

Related Characters: Úrsula Iguarán , José Arcadio (I)
Page Number: 132
Explanation and Analysis:

“Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?”

“What other reason could there be? Colonel Gerineldo Márquez answered. “For the great Liberal party.”

“You’re lucky because you know why,” he answered. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve come to realize only just now that I’m fighting because of pride.”

“That’s bad,” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez said.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía was amused at his alarm. “Naturally,” he said. “But in any case, it’s better than not knowing why you’re fighting.” He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile:

“Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn’t have any meaning for anyone.”

Related Characters: Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Gerineldo Márquez
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8  Quotes

They became great friends. They even came to think about the possibility of coordinating the popular elements of both parties, doing away with the influence of the military men and professional politicians, and setting up a humanitarian regime that would take the best from each doctrine.

Related Characters: Colonel Aureliano Buendía, José Raquel Moncada
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10  Quotes

From then on he was never sure who was who. Even when they grew up and life made them different, Úrsula still wondered if they themselves might not have made a mistake in some moment of their intricate game of confusion and had become changed forever.

Related Characters: Úrsula Iguarán , Aureliano Segundo, José Arcadio Segundo
Related Symbols: Names
Page Number: 182
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11  Quotes

But when they recovered from the noise of the whistles and the snorting, all the inhabitants ran out into the street and saw Aureliano Triste waving from the locomotive, and in a trance they saw the flower-bedecked train which was arriving for the first time eight months late. The innocent yellow train that was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo.

Related Characters: Aureliano Triste
Page Number: 222
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12  Quotes

“Quite the opposite,” she said, “I’ve never felt better.”

She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.

Related Characters: Úrsula Iguarán , Amaranta, Remedios the Beauty, Fernanda del Carpio
Page Number: 236
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13  Quotes

She did not tell anyone about it because it would have been a public recognition of her uselessness. She concentrated on a silent schooling in the distances of things and people’s voices, so that she would still be able to see with her memory what the shadows of her cataracts no longer allowed her to.

Related Characters: Úrsula Iguarán
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis:

He grew harder and harder ever since Colonel Gerineldo Márquez refused to back him up in a senile war. He locked himself up inside himself and the family finally thought of him as if he were dead.

Related Characters: Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Gerineldo Márquez
Page Number: 263
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14  Quotes

Úrsula did not get up again after the nine nights of mourning for Amaranta, Santa Sofia de la Piedad took care of her. She took her meals to her bedroom and annatto water for her to wash in and kept her up to date on everything that happened in Macondo. Aureliano Segundo visited her frequently and he brought her clothing which she would place beside the bed along with the things most indispensible for daily life, so that in a short time she had built up a world within reach of her hand.

Related Characters: Úrsula Iguarán , Amaranta, Santa Sofia de la Piedad, Aureliano Segundo
Page Number: 283
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16  Quotes

Úrsula was their most amusing plaything. They looked upon her as a big, broken-down doll that they carried back and forth from one corner to another wrapped in colored cloth and with her face painted with soot and annatto, and once they were on the point of plucking out her eyes with the pruning shears as they had done with the frogs. Nothing gave them as much excitement as the wanderings of her mind. Something, indeed, must have happened to her mind during the third year of the rain, for she was gradually losing her sense of reality and confusing present time with remote periods in her life to the point where, on one occasion, she spent three days weeping deeply over the death of Petronila Iguarán, her great-grandmother, buried for over a century.

Related Characters: Úrsula Iguarán , Amaranta Úrsula, Aureliano
Page Number: 327
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

At first he attributed it to that the fact that Aureliano could speak about Rome as if he had lived there many years, but he soon became aware that he knew things that were not in the encyclopedias, such as the price of the items. “Everything is known,” was the only reply he received from Aureliano when he asked him where he had got that information from. Aureliano, for his part, was surprised that José Arcadio when seen from close by was so different from the image that he had formed of him when he saw him wandering through the house. He was capable of laughing, of allowing himself from time to time a feeling of nostalgia for the past of the house, and of showing concern for the state of misery present in Melquíades’ room. That drawing closer together of two solitary people of the same blood was far from friendship, but it did allow them both to bear up better under the unfathomable solitude that separated and united them at the same time.

Related Characters: José Arcadio (II), Aureliano
Page Number: 373
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralyzed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquíades’ final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man’s time and space: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.

Related Characters: Melquíades, Aureliano
Page Number: 415
Explanation and Analysis:

Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

Related Characters: Aureliano
Page Number: 417
Explanation and Analysis: