Blog Post #7 One Hundred Years of Solitude

"He spent six hours exmining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time. He spent the whole night in bed with his eyes open, calling to Prudencio Aguilar, to Melquiades, to all the dead, so that they would share his distress.But no one came. On Friday, before anyone arose, he watched the appearance of nature again until he did not have the slightest doubt that it was Monday." (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Page 78)

This is a turning point for Jose Arcadio Buendia. After the unexpected arrival of Prudencio, whom Jose Arcadio Buendia killed years ago in his hometown and avoided since he left there, Jose Arcadio Buendia suddenly realized time has stopped and stayed forever on the day Prudencio came. He was trapped by the notion that time did not move forward anymore and things remained unchanged day after day. Jose Arcadio Buendia went from worried to panic, to frustrated, and finally to desperate. Facing the impossibility for change and the hopelessness for progress, he could not cope with them any longer and decided to destroy things in exchange for a slightest difference.

I was especially interested in what caused him to believe that time has stopped. One possible answer I could think of lies in his meeting with Prudencio. Prudencio was his reason for leaving hometown and establishing Macondo, his reason for leaving his past behind and starting his new life in a place that's in the middle of nowhere. He banned gamecocks in Macondo again in the hope of not repeating the past. All of a sudden, all the effort over several decades evaporated at the moment Prudencio walked into his house. Another reason might be the death of Melquiades. He was the man who brought news of what happened in the world and creations signifying the progress of science/human wisdom/knowledge. Without him informing the latest discoveries and explaining tricks behind unusual phenomenons, Jose Arcadio Buendia felt helpless and difficult catching up with the new things. I am wondering if there are other reasons behind his fear of the broken of "the time machine."







(As a side note, the sense of time being stretched infinitely reminds me of a film Dazed and Confused by Richard Linklater, which also speaks to an era of standstill, a feeling of being unable to make any change, a future that does not look much different than the present. When reading Jose Arcadio Buendia's frustration of waking up and learning that time never moved beyond Monday, I was constantly reminded of watching the whole film Dazed and Confused until the very end of it and realizing only one day in the movie has passed.)