Biblical Allusion

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is the story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo which is a metaphorical representation of Colombia. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude takes an entirely new meaning when analyzed through Biblical Allusion. This is particularly true when using the lenses to evaluate the various actions of the characters the pass though and live in the village and the things occurring in the village. Though the lens of Biblical Allusion Márquez’s novel becomes a metonymy for the events that unfold in the bible. The novel starts just as the bible does, with the creation of the Earth or in this case the beginning of Macondo,

In chapter fifteen Fernanda sends her daughter, Meme, who has just gone into the convent. Soon after a nun comes back and gives her a basket, and inside of the basket is Meme’s soon that she had out of wedlock. Fernanda tries to kill the baby but cannot go through with it so she tells everyone that she found the baby floating down the river in a basket. The story of how Aureliano Babilonia ended up being Fernanda is metronomes with the story of how Moses ended up as the Pharaoh’s daughter’s child, “She placed the child in [the basket] and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile…” (Exodus 2:3). This is the same way Aureliano Babilonia came to Fernanda. Another similarity between the two is that they were both isolated as children because they arrived by mastery and did not belong to the women who said they were their mothers. While Moses was in isolation he was being trained by God to save the people, Aureliano Babilonia was becoming the destruction of all of Macondo. Coincidentally Aureliano last name, Babilonia has a similar pronunciation as the ancient city of corruption, Babylon, “The broad wall of Babylon shall be leveled to the ground, and her high gates shall be burned with fire” (Jeremiah 51:58). Aureliano Babilonia’s birth more or less foreshadows the end of everything that Macondo

Macondo is being ruled by a dictatorship like regime and the banana plantation that is thriving is by unfair leaders who do not care about the safety of their workers. The whole city is corrupt and full of evil at this point. The workers begin to strike because at the plantation there are bad and unsafe conditions that the people want to still be there. When they continue protest, the dictators murder all of the workers and their family members in rage, blood streaked everywhere and the only one to see it is José Arcadio Segundo, no one believes him that it happened because of the plantation owners manipulation and evilness. This event can be seen as the breaking point because it begins to rain, "The sky crumbled into a set of destructive storms and out the North came hurricane that scattered roofs about and knocked down walls and uprooted every last plant of the banana groves” (pg. 315). It rains for about five years, when the rain comes it removes all evidence of the massacre that occurred at the banana plantation as if nothing happened at all. Just as in the bible God told Noah to build an arch for himself, his family and two of every animal because he was sending rain to cleanse the earth of all the evilness and the wrong doings of the people, “And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:12). The people of Macondo got lost and distracted by the new technology and glamor of the future that they “lost” their way