With this novel dealing with multiple elements relating to the fantastic, one component that stood out to me was death, or the use of “death” and the ritual surrounding it.
Melquíades’ death, as it was described, was anticipated, but “ the process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical.” His deterioration was, from what I read, something that happened in a matter of weeks, leading up to his death. While the death itself wouldn’t be considered something fatastic, it was how he was found that was.
That day he went into the water at a bad spot and they did not find him until the following day, a few miles downstream, washed up on a bright bend in the river and with a solitary vulture sitting on his stomach.
When looking this up, I found that the vulture is a symbol of rebirth and purification. Thus, this could be an implication that Melquíades has passed on to become immortal (a spirit). The whole ritual of Melquíades’s death was unusual, with the celebration lasting nine nights. This, again, is something that implies spiritual enlightenment and awakening.
Melquíades remaining as a spirit is later seen in the novel:
No one had gone into the room again since they had taken Melquíades’ body out and had put on the door a padlock whose parts had become fused together with rust. But when Aureliano Segundo opened the windows a familiar light entered that seemed accustomed to lighting the room every day and there was not the slightest trace of dust or cobwebs, with everything swept and clean, better swept and cleaner than on the day of the burial, and the ink had not dried up in the inkwell nor had oxidation diminished the shine of the metals nor had the embers gone out under the water pipe where José Arcadio Buendía had vaporized mercury.
Interesting that the vulture is a symbol of rebirth; I think that another meaning there could be linked to the passage of time in this novel, how certain events keep repeating across generations as history goes on.
that is very insightful about the vulture. I didn’t look at it before as more than a bird of prey and the fact that he wasn’t found for the next day.
I found a lot of the novel to have a lot of “iffiness” around death. Melquíades dies and comes back many times, we see the ghost of the man Jose Arcadio Buendía murders, his own death takes years, Ursula lives for and ungodly amount of time, and Remedios the Beauty just ascends into heaven without an official death. Even some of the characters deaths were predicted and told long before they take place. I think death not being taken seriously is the closest thing to a fantastic element the story gets.