One Hundred Years of Solitude: Relationship between Ursual and Jose Arcadio Buendia

One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Relationship between Ursual and Jose Arcadio Buendia

In literature, a central relationship can bond a group, and serve as a measure of the vitality of the society that it bonds. One such monumental relationship is that between Ursual and Jose Arcadio Buendia in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the chosen passage, the author uses imagery, metaphors, and characterization to illustrate their relationship, establishing a preview of their future relationship, harboring its development into the measure of stability of that society.

As the passage opens, the reader is immediately made aware of Jose Arcadio Buendia's feelings about the current location of Macondo. He felt trapped in Macondo, away from the advances of modern science, as if evident by his map of "peninsular" Macondo. Unsatisfied without the most modern advances of science, in a fit of rage, Jose Arcadio Buendia drew a map of Macondo, exaggerating their isolation, then proceeded to take responsibility for this isolation.

Marquez uses superb imagery, beautifully illustrating this feeling, when he describes the laboratory as a small, closed in space. He illustrates a very frustrated man, struggling against his isolation, working in his small laboratory. This man finally releases some of these pent up feelings and is filled with rage. In fact, as he draws the map, he "punish [es] himself for the absolute lack of sense with which he had chosen the place." As he sat in his isolated laboratory, oblivious to the events occurring in the outside world, Jose Arcadio Buen...

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...n them with an inked brush, without reproaching him, but knowing now that he knew (because she had heard him say so in his soft monologues) that the men of the village would not back him up in his undertaking. Only when he began to take down the door of the room did Ursula dare ask him what he was doing, and he answered with a certain bitterness. "Since no one wants to leave, we'll leave all by ourselves." Ursula did not become upset.

"We will not leave," she said. "We will stay here, because we have had a son here."

"We have still not had a death," he said. "A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dad under the ground."

Ursula replied with a soft firmness:

"If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die."

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper Perennial: New York, 1991, pages 13-14.