In- Process 1

For my first quarter independent reading I'm reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book tells the story of the Buendia family that lives in the magical town of Macondo. The story goes between past and present from how the patriarch of the family Jose Arcadio and his wife Ursula come to live in Macondo and their family as it grows and expands rapidly as they get their kids get married and have their own kids. In the first couple of chapters you get to know Aureliano, Jose, and Amaranta who are Jose and Ursula's kids but the soon Aureliano and Jose have their own kids that have the same name as past family members (Not going to lie it can be confusing).

However, the book switches easily between what is happening now in the kids now that they're adults and what happened to them as children. For example at the beginning it states" Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice", while only the first sentence Marquez is talking about the present and states that it will then move to the past (1). It can sometimes be hard to tell what order things are happening in, like when "Colonel Aureliano Buendia organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all…" and then later "The war was over in May.. Colonel Aureliano Buendia fell prisoner" (103,121). Marquez writes with the purpose to write like this that I'm not completely sure at this moment but it's very evident that it's important to go back and forth between the past and present. Maybe because the characters are changing and there's something kind of magical about the town of Macondo that the book wouldn't be written in a linear way.

Also I notice that he uses color for imagery a lot. On the first page he describes the houses as "white an enormous, like prehistoric eggs" but later orders are given "for all the houses to be painted blue in celebration of the anniversary of national independence" (1,55). When the family first arrived in Macondo the houses are white, representing a type of purity, or sense of innocence because as the family lives there for long their lives become more complicated. Then when the houses are painted blue but another change is made when "The new house, white, like a dove" (59). Colors represent something to Marquez and his characters. White is the mark of something new? Or Pure? But after patriarch Jose Arcadio dies the family sees "a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling" (140). The image of "yellow flowers" marks someones death which also means change for the Buendia family.