2. Perception of death.
Jose Arcadio reflects on his life as he awaits his fate with the firing squad. This moment of reflection gives Arcadio a crystallized perspective of what is truly important in life and what true value life holds in the face of death. Arcadio thought about his mother and her love for his father, his unnamed daughter, his unborn child and the woman he loved.
“In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia,”(Page 119).
In the past, Jose Arcadio had been tormented by a fear of dying, but in the face of death his fears melted and his desire for time to spend and a life to live with the people who matter the most made him ache with yearning. Despite his reflections, Arcadio is certain to tell his wife to name their child Ursula, after his mother. This reflected the “inward thinking” of the family which continues even as it brings the family to death. – Even as he faces the firing squad next to corpses, he is frustrated that he forgot to tell his wife to name a baby girl Remedios. “Then all accumulated in the rip of a claw, he felt again all the terror that had tormented him in his life,”(page 120).
Death is feared during life, then life is treasured more in the threat of death, but instinctual fear consumes the body when battling death in the final hours.
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