Varieties of the Fantastic in Fiction

“Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendant of the plans with which Jose Arcadio Buendia had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Ursula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle,” writes Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and as Ursula’s impressions of time are confirmed, so are our own (221).

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a complicated story, filled with characters who all seem to have the same name and plot points that almost seem to repeat themselves as time progresses in the novel. While there are countless strange and fantastic occurrences throughout the story, I found time to be one of the most interesting aspects. Part of this does have to do with the characters; as Ursula points out in the scene quoted above, certain things about certain characters remind us of previous characters, ones who might have been almost forgotten or confused with another in the scramble of repeated names. Then with these new events with new characters unfolding, we are suddenly reminded of the other character and how the events surrounding them played out. When two (or three, or ten) characters have the same name, it is also easy to forget who did what; one Aureliano could do something and for a moment, we might think it was another. The similarity of the characters’ names adds to the circularity of time because we realize how easily another character could have done the exact same thing years earlier.

The circularity of time also plays a role in the plot, as well. Early on in the novel, when people begin to forget things, they turn to fortune telling, not to learn things about their future but to learn things about their past:

“Pilar Ternera was the one who contributed most to popularize that mystification when she conceived the trick of reading the past in cards as she had read the future before. By means of that recourse the insomniacs began to live in a world built on the uncertain alternatives of the cards, where a father was remembered faintly as the dark man who had arrived at the beginning of April and a mother was remembered only as the dark woman who wore a gold ring on her left hand, and where a birth date was reduced to the last Tuesday on which a lark sang in the laurel tree” (47-48).

These new “discoveries” now become these people’s pasts and affect how they will think of the past in the future, complicating how time is viewed.

There is also the matter of the vision Fernanda sees as a little girl:

“When she was a little girl, on one moonlit night, Fernanda saw a beautiful woman dressed in white crossing the garden toward the chapel. What bothered her most about that fleeting vision was that she felt it was exactly like her, as if she had seen herself twenty years in advance. ‘It was your great-grandmother the queen,’ her mother told her during a truce in her coughing. ‘She died of some bad vapors while she was cutting a string of bulbs.’ Many years later, when she began to feel she was the equal of her great-grandmother, Fernanda doubted her childhood vision, but her mother scolded her disbelief” (206).

This vision, too, regardless of whether it was Fernanda from the future or her grandmother from the past, shows how circular time is.

The way we as readers come to understand things also deals with the matter of time. For example, the opening line of the novel is “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.” Because we have this sentence, we know the events we are about to read have already happened, but we do not yet know when these “many years later” are occurring.

I’m sure there are countless other examples of how time relates to One Hundred Years of Solitude, and each example shows how closely intertwined the lives of these characters are.