Buendia Family

In this passage, Gabriel Garcia Marquez summarizes and conveys the perpetual motion and inevitable downfall of the Buendia family from Pilar Ternera’s perspective. Since she was young Pilar has been caught up in the Buendia family affairs. Jose Arcadio was the first to sneak into her house and make love to her when she was only a child. She stays and she had intimate relationships with several Buendias until Macondo becomes an isolated town once more. Besides sleeping with many of the Buendia family boys as they come of age, Pilar also told the future through her "cards"(Marquez 396). After watching generation after generation of the family succumb to the same faults as previous generations, the “unavoidable repetitions” became clear to her.

A generation later Jose Arcadio Segundo builds a canal to promote trade, but only a single boat comes through. After two generations of furthering the connection with the outside world, Aureliano establishes a train in Macondo which breaks the eternal spin and brings the demise because too many people were in Macondo. The wearing of the wheel brought in the white people whose primary interest was money. Along with the banana plantation came death; seventeen Aurelianos lost their lives along with 3,000 workers because of the eventual wearing and tearing of the wheel caused the end of a cycle of Buendia exploration. Generation after generation the Jose Arcadios exhibit “impulsive and enterprising qualities”(Marquez 181) while the Aurelianos are “lucid and withdrawn”. It is because of their mirror-like qualities that Pilar Ternera already knows their cyclical fate. The Buendias’ future was predicted on numerous occasions for them and they seldom listened. Pilar Tenar told Colonel Aureliano Buendía to watch his mouth. The Colonel who didn’t take Pilar’s advice later was poisoned by coffee. Melquiades also wrote the future of the Buendia but left it locked in a room to eventually be deciphered. After the Buendias neglect the future told in Pilar's cards, family patterns, or Melquiades writing, it is too late. The last two