Blog Post #9 100 Years of Solitude

Page 310: "During the day the soldiers walked through the torrents in the streets with their pant legs rolled up, playing with boats with the children. At night, after taps, they knocked doors down with their rifle butts, hauled suspects out of their beds, and took them off on trips from which there was no return. The search for and extermination of the hoodlums, murderers, arsonists, and rebels of Decree No. 4 was still going on, but the military denied it even to the relatives of the victims who crowded the commandments' offices in search of news. 'You must have been dreaming,' the officers insisted. 'Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. This is a happy town.' In that way they were finally able to wipe out the union leaders."

This part of the chapter really caught my attention. As I was reading this section, I wondered if Jose Arcadio Segundo was really alive. We had just read that he was part of the protests, then taken away on the train with the rest of the dead, and then he managed to walk all the way back to Macondo only to find out that "nothing happened" and there were no "dead." I couldn't help but think, did all of that not just happen? Was it a hallucination? Was Jose Arcadio Segundo dead and in another Macondo? Then we find out that the military was lying to the residents of Macondo. Just by saying that something like that never happens in Macondo shouldn't work the way it did, even though almost all of the protesters died. The military was able to keep their actions secret and feed lies to the town. These lies might have worked, but I had another thought about it. What if the people were not believing these lies, but they were in so much fear from the military that they don't talk about the incident. This shows what kind of control the military can have over a city-state like this. Macondo cannot be that large, and the military comes in and enforces martial law. The military has almost complete control of the people's actions and what is said. They pretend to be likable by playing with the kids in the day, but that is just a front for what they really are. They are making sure that they can appeal and control the people of Macondo. They even tried to hunt down Jose Arcadio Segundo, but somehow didn't recognize him. The military is a scary force at this point in the book, and what makes them so terrifying is the control that they have over people's thoughts and actions.