100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This quote from George Santayana lays out a common principle of life: Those who do not gain knowledge of the past, specifically past mistakes, are doomed to repeat it. More than that, those who remain aware of the past but refuse to learn from their mistakes are similarly cursed into a cycle of disappointment and suffering, as seen in 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez demonstrates that religion can act as an important conduit for people to study how the errors committed in history can lead us to make more moral decisions in the future.

In 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez conveys the idea that religion can guide the morality of a society if its denizens simply choose to acknowledge information from the past. This theme is illustrated through the biblical parallels Márquez draws with the incestral relationship of José Arcadio Buendía and Ursula Iguarán, the death of Prudencio Aguilar, and the figure of José Arcadio Buendía.

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The founding of Macondo on the tainted relationship between José Arcadio Buendía and Ursula Iguarán is the first instance in which Márquez conveys the dangers of not learning from the past. José and Ursula, though cousins, were almost preordained to be married before they were even born, much in the way that Adam and Eve were fashioned by God to be perfect partners for each other. However, José and Ursula’s union was nowhere near perfect as both knew that their marriage was impure and immoral.

Ursula would even curse the day Sir Francis Drake attacked her great-great-grandmother’s village of Riohacha, as that was the event that started to tie her life to José’s. “It was simply a way of giving herself some relief, because actually they were joined till death by a bond that was more solid than love: a common prick of conscience.” (Márquez 20).

José and Ursula are bound together not by love but by the feeling of guilt they both harbor for getting married when they knew better. Even though relatives of the two had incestral relations and consequently produced a child with a pig’s tail, this did not deter the stubborn José from being wed to Ursula. Their decision to enter into an imperfect union can be paralleled with the destructive nature of Adam and Eve’s decision in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were given specific instructions by God and yet disobeyed them anyways, instead believing that what little intelligence they inherently had was enough to make decisions off of. As a result of their stubbornness, Original Sin blossomed.

Likewise, José and Ursula refuse to accept any warnings that their marriage is dishonorable and proceed with their nuptials anyways, in turn fostering their own original sin of incest that propagates in future generations of the already tainted Buendía family. Through this parallel, Márquez shows how José and Ursula could have used the advice given to them and learned from the mistakes of Adam and Eve to forge new, moral paths for themselves. Instead, they chose to ignore history, a decision which cast a shadow over the lives of future descendants of the Buendía family.

In addition to the devastating effects that incest had on the Buendía family, grievous sin in the form of murder also played a large role in keeping the Buendías on the wrong path throughout the novel. Before even founding Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía was infected by the influence of sin. He murdered Prudencio Aguilar, a cockfighter, after the man insulted José. Filled with grief, he moved to the swamps and founded the village of Macondo. But years later, after José has gone insane in his quest for knowledge, he is visited by the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar. “‘Prudencio,’ he exclaimed. ‘You've come from a long way off!’ After many years of death the yearning for the living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the nearness of that other death which exists within death, that Prudencio Aguilar had ended up loving his worst enemy.” (Márquez 53).

The murder of Prudencio haunted José for years and it is fitting that in his own moment of insanity José is visited by the man who was once his enemy. Márquez paints a parallel here between José in Macondo and Cain from the Bible. Just as Cain murdered his own brother and suffered for the rest of his life, José commits a mortal sin early on and in the aftermath he slowly spirals into mania. Additionally, Márquez states that one of the reasons for Prudencio’s return lies in his “pressing need for company”, a desire which mirrors José’s own lifelong aspiration to escape from solitude. Also pertinent is the other religious connection that can be made when Márquez refers to a death that exists within death. Here he alludes to the widely held belief in Colombian culture that the departed exist in an afterlife as a result of their memory being kept intact by the living, and should that memory fade away, the deceased will die again. All of these religious parallels are used to present Márquez’s point that refusing to have faith and not gaining insight from the past will ultimately lead one down a corrupt path.

As the patriarch of the Buendía family, José Arcadio Buendía laid the foundation for how Macondo would evolve and grow. And at first he was the successful leader that the town needed, arranging houses in strategic ways and looking out for the welfare of the community. However, José was a flawed man who, with the arrival of the gypsies, became obsessed with gaining more knowledge of the outside world. “That spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets, the astronomical calculations, the dreams of transmutation, and the urge to discover the wonders of the world. From a clean and active man, José Arcadio Buendía changed into a man lazy in appearance…” (Márquez 9).

José became enamored by the inventions that the gypsies brought into town and he believed the knowledge he gained from studying them was the key to escaping solitude. Here again we see him as the Adam figure - a man whose quest for knowledge, carried on by his descendants, results in the loss of innocence for his family. Adam and José strive to gain an understanding of the larger world, but both men seek out more wisdom instead of using the knowledge they already have. José pushes his town into modernity all the while staying isolated in his laboratory, showing that his efforts to innovate the town only digs him deeper into solitude. His actions further exemplify the recurring theme that ignorance of the past only promulgates a cycle of disappointment and insanity.

Through his use of biblical parallels in 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez shows how religion can be a guide to morality for society if people choose to learn from past mistakes. With the incestral relationship of José Arcadio Buendía and Ursula Iguarán, the death of Prudencio Aguilar, and the figure of José Arcadio Buendía, Márquez demonstrates the religious connections that the events in this book have with the Bible. Understanding these connections reveals that the Buendía family’s inability to acknowledge history was one of the root causes of their disintegration as a civilization. Their continued endeavors to escape solitude only resulted in the further internal seclusion of the people of Macondo.