Blog Post 9

“Macondo was in ruins… The banana company tore down it’s installations. All that remained of the former wired-in city were the ruins. The wooden houses, the cool terraces for breezy card-playing afternoons, seemed to have blown away in anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth.” (330)

Throughout many points of the text Marquez uses religious parallels. I was curious as to why this is so, because the people of Macondo don’t believe in typical religious practices. One possible reason that matches the genre in which the story is written (magical realism) is that the religious occurrences, such as the years of rain, are shared phenomenons that may occur in both religious and magic realist texts. By utilizing the religious events such as the rainfall, it allows Marquez to create a previously exposed to chain of events that are then more easily accepted and enjoyed by the reader.

The rain, matching it’s cleansing properties in religious readings, seems to be doing the same for Macondo. The tension and impurity that has occurred with more outsiders coming in has culminated with a necessary cleanse. Why were original Macondo inhabitants not warned or spared in some manner? It seems that if there were to be a cleanse the original inhabitants that didn’t necessarily contribute to the alteration of the land and their ways would be spared from the catastrophe.

If no one was spared then it may be an indication that all inhabitants were of equal blame, the original Macondo people as well as the foreigners that came to reap benefits from the people and land. This creates questions about when, exactly, Macondo people established the poor fate for themselves. I feel that Marquez is trying to show the reader that no matter what outside intervention and corruption takes place, it is impossible to remove yourself from the scenario, requiring that you assign yourself some of the blame.