Of course, as we all know the entire novel OHYOS is fantastic — from the timeline, the gypsies, the incest, and the naiveté of the people of Macondo. In the second half of OHYOS there is many fantastic elements in the story. For example, when José Arcadio dies, the blood from his ear forms a trail that leads its way to the home of Úrsula, even “hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs…. They found no wound on his body nor could they locate the weapon.” Also fantastic is the smell of gun powder that is so strong and will not go away, as are the extreme measures they use to try to remove the smell from his body: “Finally they put him in a barrel of lye and let him stay for six hours.” The smell, though, will not leave. “Although in the months that followed they reinforced the grave with walls about it, between which they threw compressed ash, sawdust, and quicklime, the cemetery still smelled of powder for many years after, until the engineers from the banana company covered the grave over with a shell of concrete.”
When Colonel Aureliano Buendía wrote Úrsula telling her papa was going to die and they moved him to the bedroom, “…he had developed the faculty of being able to increase his weight at will, to such a degree that seven men were unable to lift him and they had to drag him to the bed.” When José Arcadio Buendía did pass, it rained tiny yellow flowers that “covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors.”
Another example of the fantastic, near the end of the book, is when Amaranta Úrsula gives birth to a son born with the tail of a pig from inbreeding, although the baby’s parents were unaware of the family’s history. The child is carried off by ants and eaten. “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.”
Odd how the story starts with the Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing death and ends with death, the last member of the family being eaten by ants.
I like your final point, about how, in a way, the family begins and ends with death. I think this ties in nicely with how circular everything in the novel is.