The document discusses the concept of reality through the lens of the fictional town of Macondo from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude". It explores questions around what constitutes reality, memories, dreams, and the existence of Macondo. While Macondo seems real to its inhabitants, from an outside perspective it may only exist within the constructs of literature and the human mind. By blurring the lines between reality and fiction, Marquez leaves the reader questioning what parts of the story reflect actual existence and what remains in the realm of ideas and imagination.
13. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away,
momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably
when they forgot the values of the written letters.
At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that
said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said
GOD EXISTS.
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15. No one doubted the divine origin of the demonstration except José
Arcadio Buendía, who without changing expression watched the troop
of people who gathered around the chestnut tree one morning to
witness the revelation once more. He merely stretched on his stool a
little and shrugged his shoulders when Father Nicanor began to rise up
from the ground along with the chair he was sitting on.
“Hoc est simplicissimus,” José Arcadio Buendía said. “Homo iste
statum quartum materiae invenit.”
Wednesday, February 1, 12 10
22. “There must have been three thousand of them,” he murmured.
“What?”
“The dead,” he clari!ied. “It must have been all of the people who were
at the station.
The woman measured him with a pitying look. “There haven’t been
any dead here.”
Wednesday, February 1, 12 15
24. The link was born on the night when he casually mentioned Colonel
Aureliano Buendía and Gabriel was the only one who did not think
that he was making fun of somebody. Even the proprietress, who
normally did not take part in the conversation argued with a madam's
wrathful passion that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, of whom she had
indeed heard speak at some time, was a !igure invented by the
government as a pretext for killing Liberals.
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25. The past coexists with the present and never more so than in societies
seemingly outside history.
Jeff Browitt
Wednesday, February 1, 12 18
31. He liked to go from room to room. As in a gallery of parallel mirrors,
until Prudencio Aguilar would touch him on the shoulder. Then he
would go back from room to room, walking in reverse, going back over
his trail, and he would !ind Prudencio Aguilar in the room of reality.
But one night, two weeks a!ter they took him to his bed, Prudencio
Aguilar touched his shoulder in an intermediate room and he stayed
there forever, thinking that it was the real room.
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32. He dreamed that he was going into an empty house with white walls
and that he was upset by the burden of being the !irst human being to
enter it. In the dream he remembered that he had dreamed the same
thing the night before and on many nights over the past years and he
knew that the image would be erased from his memory when he
awakened because that recurrent dream had the quality of not being
remembered except within the dream itself.
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43. The World
Time
Macondo
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44. José Arcadio Buendía dreamed that night that right there a noisy city
with houses having mirror wails rose up. He asked what city it was
and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had
no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream:
Macondo. On the following day he convinced his men that they would
never !ind the sea. He ordered them to cut down the trees to make a
clearing beside the river, at the coolest spot on the bank, and there they
founded the village.
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45. Before reaching the !inal line, however, he had already understood
that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of
mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from
the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia
would !inish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written
on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more,
because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have
a second opportunity on earth.
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48. How does Marquez utilize the
differences between reality and
perception of the characters to lead
the reader to question the existence
of the one hundred years?*
*Avoid mere plot summary.
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