100 Years of Solitude Chap 1-5, Question 2

One theme that I found to be important in the first five chapters is: use of TIME / LACK OF TIME

The book begins with a flashback; “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice…like prehistoric eggs,”(page 1).

There are also scenes from the present time (or what appears to be present time) that jump back and forth to flashbacks and flash forwards:

“Aureliano, the first human being to be born in Macondo, would be six years old in March. (Present) He was silent and withdrawn. He had wept in his mother’s womb and had been born with his eyes open. As they were cutting the umbilical cord, he moved his head side to side, taking in things in the room and examining faces with fearless curiosity (flashback)…at the age of three, went into the kitchen at the moment she was taking a pot of boiling soup from the stove and putting on the table. The child, perplexed, from the doorway said, “It’s going to spill.” The pot was firmly placed at the center of the table, but just as soon as he said this, it began to move towards the edge and fell and broke on the floor,”(flash forward from the flashback) (Pages 14-15).

This continues steadily throughout the five chapters, I think that it makes it difficult to keep track of what is actually occurring in the present time. However, I think that it forces readers to have a more panoramic view of the story of the family, and all the events that contribute to their legacy. In this way, we are able to take in the various events that are occurring, while understanding that the bloodline of the family in Macondo is what ties all of the events together. The timeline is so vast, beginning during a time when, “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point,”(page 1). Therefore, the lack of chronologic time in the novel, enables the reader to disregard time as limiting factor to the story, instead to experience the novel and ignore the constraints of time that distract us from our daily life.