Blog 9

“She was seeing Colonel Aureliano Buendia once more as she had seen him in the light of a lamp long before the wars, long before the desolation of glory and the exile of disillusionment, that remote dawn when he went to her bedroom to give the first command of his life:the command to give him love. It was Pilar Ternera. Years before, when she had reached one hundred forty-five years  of age, she had given up the pernicious custom of keeping track of her age and she went on living in the static and marginal time of memories, in a future perfectly revealed and established, beyond the futures disturbed by the insidious snares and suppositions of her cards” (Marquez, 395).

Time is not a single line in this novel and instead is an endless loop which results in themes in the Buendia family to repeat itself. The figures that constant in this never ending loop are Pilar Ternera and Ursula. They both guide the family in some way and they both do it through the use of time and memories. Pilar is the woman that all the Buendia men continuously are drawn to and it is because of inherited memory. This was a constant pattern of the book when characters constantly repeated their mistakes even though they had memory on their side. Their life comes off like a prophecy of unending debauchery that keeps the Buendia family from succeeding. As the town moves into the future they are restrained to their past.  The end of the Buendia family was the end of life in Macondo. The Buendia family repeated habits that destroyed their family and succumbed to the temptation of lust, envy, greed, pride, gluttony,wrath, and sloth, . There are several instances of these but just to name a few: 

• Lust runs rampant through the family as they divulge in forbidden incest and through the death of several men who die lusting over Remidios the beauty
• Envy through love relations between multiple people like Rebeca and Amaranta on fighting for the attention of the same man and results in Amaranta burning her own hand
•  Greed is seen through the death of Jose Arcadio (II) after he relies upon getting an inheritance he comes back to town and finds the money Ursula hid and is murdered and robbed by local kids
• Pride when Arcadio is in charge of Macondo during the uprising and becomes a vicious dictator who is obsessed with order and is killed for it  

They succumb to the seven deadly sins which collapses their life and all life. This also plays into the religious undertones of the novel with the destruction of mankind through devious temptations as shown in the Bible.