Heredity and Generational Cyclity in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Oral Presentation

Panel B: “Character Creation” Oak Room

The history of Colombia is fraught with conquest, myth, and patterns of oppression and revolution. Gabriel Garcia Marquez parallels the cycles of Colombian history in his magical realist novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. The patterns of incest, traits, failures, and names within the Buendia family are representative of the tension between genetic fate and choice that exists universally. Marquez uses repetition to make points about the nature of war, family, and the individual. Brian Conniff’s research on science and apocalypse in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” supports these ideas and makes connections in the text with the ideas of societal and scientific progress. The family cannot escape their tragic fate because they cannot break their own self-determined pattern of self destruction.