One Hundred Years of Solitude - PART TWO - Week 8

 I've spent the weekend thinking about what I want to write about for this week, and I think the idea I keep going back to is the idea of isolation/loneliness I wrote about for part one. This second half of the book is similar to the first in that each character follows some kind of path to solitude, however in this half we see how that brings each character to their death. In true fashion, this book ends with the death of each character and sometimes in gruesome ways. By the end of the novel the town of Macondo has returned to its lonely and abandoned state, and Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano are the main remaining characters. However the words and fears of characters who came before them and since died, continue to haunt the remaining Buendías family. In particular, Ursula's biggest fear, which she refers to throughout the book, comes true, a child is born with the tail of a pig.

Although disturbing, the ending almost felt fitting, I mean this in the sense that the demise of the family was from a mistake they kept on making despite its warningings. I found it almost inevitable that the fear that haunted the original Buendías family in the beginning of the book turned out to be the reason for the collapse of the family years later. When Úrsula marries her first cousin, Jose Arcadio Buendía, she is haunted by the fear of incest and it is stated several times that a child will be born with the tail of a pig. 

When reading I often questioned what the significance of incest was, and why did Márquez choose to make it such a recurring theme throughout his novel. I wondered if it was truly necessary, and questioned why the author chose to integrate it into the novel. The part of me that loves politics and history, began to question whether Márquez use of incest had a deeper meaning. Perhaps it represented the isolation/solitude and self-centeredness within the Buendías family themselves, or even represented a critique of the Latin American elite at the time of his writing. From what I understood this family never seemed to learn from their mistakes and this repetition continued throughout this half of the story. The second half of the story felt like it more so followed a timeline where history seemed to repeat itself. 

Something I found confusing, especially in this half of the book was the names, and the fact that these characters shared the same names as ones before them. My question for you all is, why do you think Márquez gave his characters the same names, do you think this was stylistic or do you think it has a deeper meaning? I kind of think Márquez may have done this for the same reason he incorporated incest into the novel, because it shows some sense of self obsession and self love that the Buendías family has for themselves, but im curious to know what you all think.