One Hundred Years Of Solitude Rhetorical Analysis

Introduction Hook. In his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez creates a dual symbolism for the parchment containing Melquiades’s cryptic writings on it. The parchment is used as a symbol to represent Melquiades and his sense of knowledge and relation to supernatural. Marquez also utilizes the parchment to symbolize several figurative senses in the novel. The decryption of the parchments symbolizes the novel’s themes of an unending desire for knowledge, an eventual death and solitude, and the inevitability of the characters’ fates. One aspect that is continuous throughout the Buendia family lineage is the aspiration for greater knowledge and understanding. The parchments symbolize this longing for truth and knowledge.

This can be seen by the suggestion that a role or event is someone’s fate to live out; it is seen by the all the fates of the Buendias being prophesied through Melquiades’s writings. This idea of fate as inevitable events or outcomes that are predetermined is first shown by Melquiades when selling Jose Arcadio Buendia the inventions. Marquez writes, “Melquiades, who was an honest man, warned him: 'It won't work for that.' But José Arcadio Buendia at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots.” (2) Furthering this point, Marquez writes, “Again Melquiades tried to dissuade him, but he finally accepted the two magnetized ingots and three colonial coins in exchange for the magnifying glass.” (3) Both of the excerpts explain that Melquiades knew the fate of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s outcome of his schemes to use the inventions for other schemes and informed him of the fates, but Melquiades realized that no matter his argument, fate is inevitable. Marquez also integrates the idea of fate for a single person through several examples. Ursula introduces this idea of fate to the family when stating that only GET THE EXACT QUOTE> “the true owner of the gold will find it and will get it back.” This same idea of it being Jose Arcadio II’s fate to be the person to find the gold is translated when Marquez

Although these themes are revealed by Marquez in a sense of the supernatural, these can also be used as moral lessons for virtuous life. An ambition for knowledge is good but it does have its limits, otherwise it results in an obsession. Any obsession, including an obsession for knowledge, will lead to seclusion from society and a possibly self-destruction. This symbolism of the parchment as a tangible image for fate can be taken as a motivation to live with awareness in the moment instead of fearing for the inevitable