The strange way in which time progresses and manipulates the inhabitants of Macondo is a key element of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.  Time is used not only to show changes within and around the Buendia family but to demonstrate the strange nature of the magical realist world which Marquez has created.  The, often unsubtle, temporal distortion seen throughout the novel also helps to give the book a very clear sense of being within the style of postmodernism.

This demonstration of the magical realist genre is one of the most notable ways in which Marquez presents time in the novel.  The clearest example of Marquez’s time based tricks comes in the form of Úrsula who lives to an unbelievably old age.  With this small use of magical realism, Marquez is able to stitch together a story which takes place over an unusually long period of time and give it a single common thread: Úrsula Iguarán.  Indeed, when Úrsula eventually dies it could be seen by the reader as a foreshadowing of Macondo’s impending doom.

This inference is bolstered by the fact that Macondo’s eventual destruction has been predicted from the very start of the book, unbeknownst to the reader.  Melquiadez’s parchments, which are decoded by Aureliano Babilonia, make it clear that time is not occurring in a conventional linear manner within Macondo but is unfolding in a much more complicated way.  This fact is suggested beautifully by Marquez with imagery describing Macondo as a, “city of mirrors.”  This metaphor implies that time in Macondo may repeat itself and certainly does not unravel in the usual linear manner.  Indeed, this may also represent the introspective nature of the Buendia family.  Marquez’s use of the phrase, “city of mirrors” may be deliberately ambiguous, referencing either the repetitive nature of time in Macondo, the introspective nature its inhabitants or perhaps most likely, both.  The author goes even further in this ambiguity in the final lines of the book as Aureliano Babilonia finally unravels Melquiades’s prophecy.  The confusing style and unclear meaning of the language in these parchments emphasises the confused nature of time in Macondo and links to the fact that as the reader is finding out, time in Macondo is happening in a single moment, not unravelling chronologically.

However, Marquez has suggested this throughout the book, most notably through the Buendia family itself.  The fact that the names of the members of the Buendia family have been picked from a very small list, often makes the book confusing, but this has been done deliberately by the author to suggest that time is repeating itself.  The fact that all of the Aurelianos are introverted and intense and all of the Jose Arcadios are extroverts and physically imposing, suggests that the future is not a forward movement but spiralling back towards the past.  Even the fact that when Jose Arcadio Segundo begins to become quiet and withdrawn, and his twin brother Aureliano Segundo becomes physically large and a hedonist, the rest of the Buendias suggest that they may have been switched at birth, suggests that other characters in the book have noticed the repetitions within the family.

On a smaller scale we can see this repetition over time in the form of Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s metal fish.  At first the Colonel makes these fish to sell them on, but as he gets older he begins not to sell these fish but melt them down at the end of each day, only to create them again from scratch the next morning.  This could easily be seen as an allegory for the way in which the same few names and traits seem to be endlessly recycled within the Buendia family.  Cleverly, Marquez uses the basket of the Colonel’s fish as a microcosm of the Buendia family and even goes as far as to list out the repetitive way in which their creator spends his days making them.  As the literary critic Mark Frisch notes, the Colonel only manages to find a “modicum of accommodation with this solitude,” through a repetitious lifestyle and says that on the day he breaks his repetitions and dies the Colonel, “is plagued by uncertainty and ambiguity once again”.  This suggests that although the repetition of time in Macondo may be seen as imprisoning its inhabitants, it may also help them by providing a sense of security in its familiarity.

This view is, however, undermined by the final line of the book, “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”  The use of the word, “condemned” suggests that the inhabitants of Macondo are imprisoned by time and the solitude that they spend their time on Earth in, and not, as Frisch suggests, comforted by its repetition.  Of course, it could also be considered that this is yet another binary in the book, with the contradiction between the embracing of Macondo’s strange timeline and the feeling of being imprisoned by it, an ambiguity created deliberately by Marquez, a writer who has created deliberate points of confusion for the reader throughout the book.

One of the most notable examples of Marquez’s misdirection comes near the start of the book when he says that, “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.”  The fact that this suggests the boy, known only as Aureliano Buendia at this stage in the book, will become a colonel and will be shot by a firing squad is a clever, and misleading, implication.  Whilst he does become a colonel, Aureliano is rescued before being shot by the firing squad.  This is a clever use of the omniscient nature of Marquez’s third-person narration which allows him to skip across the entire timeline of Macondo and even give deliberately misleading suggestions about events which are to come in the book.  This unusual and jumbled use of time is an important way in which Gabriel Garcia Marquez makes his book richer and gives it a more fragmented, postmodern style.  It is clear, therefore, that time is not used purely in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” as a plot feature, but is also used to give the book its unusual structure.

However, Marquez is not afraid to be far less subtle in demonstrating the circular nature of time.  On at least two occasions in the book Úrsula is shown to notice the way time repeats itself in Macondo, saying in an exasperated manner, “it’s as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning,” and later, in reference to the railroad that is soon to be developed by Aureliano Triste, is said to have, “confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle”.  This use of exposition by Gabriel Garcia Marquez leaves the reader in no doubt that time is behaving in an unusual way in the town.  In this way, Úrsula is used by the author as an audience surrogate, slowly beginning to notice the peculiarity of Macondo’s timeline throughout the book, in parallel to the reader.  Yet even when Marquez is using less subtle forms of narrative, he still maintains a subtle use of imagery, referring to time as a, “circle” in the latter quote and describing it almost as a journey in physical space in the former.  In this way, Marquez is able to use exposition in a less obvious way, maintaining the flow and style of the narrative whilst delivering key points to the reader, something which is particularly important in a story as deliberately confusing as “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

We can see, therefore, that time has a hugely important role in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel.  Time is used both as a plot feature and a literary device, with temporal distortion rooting the book in a specific genre and style: postmodernism.  Without the focus on this theme “One Hundred Years Of Solitude” would be missing a key element of what makes it a classic piece of 20th century literature.  Indeed, the universal and easily identifiable theme of time is much of what gives the book its importance as a piece of literature, separating it from many other, less notable, books outside the literary canon.

Bibliography

“You Might Be Able To Get There From Here: Reconsidering Borges and the Postmodern”, Mark F. Frisch, 2004, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press