The members of the Buendía family often find themselves feeling -or acting- lonely in the world, whether the solitude is insignificant or expressive, self-made or forced, depends on the person. For Colonel Aureliano, his solitude is physically expressed as he alienated himself from the world for much of his days to make the golden fishes. Sadly, his isolation even gets to the point where the family “thought of him as if he were dead” (Marquez, 263). But his total confinement was voluntary and reflects how, after the revolts, he really wanted to just be left alone. Another character who is found in physical solitude is Rebeca. After her husband, Jose Arcadio, passes away, “Rebeca closed the doors of her house and buried herself alive, covered with a thick crust of disdain that no earthly temptation was ever able to break” (Márquez, 133). …show more content…
Her desolation is so great that even when the Aureliano brothers find her and try to fix her house she only allows them to work on the outside prohibiting them from entering the house to fix the inside, because of her unwillingness to deal with the real, present world. There is another type of solitude expressed in the novel, and that is the one of Remedios The Beauty. She is not physically isolated, but she is mentally. Remedios lives in her own “bubble” -to put it in some way-, unaware and uninterested of the emotions and reactions of those around her towards her beauty. She shaves her head because she doesn’t feel like dealing with the hair and goes around town bearing only a linen sheet with nothing underneath, breaking hearts and causing death to men who mindlessly fall in love with her beauty. Until one day, she is physically isolated by a magical power, and floating up in the air she vanishes from the town of Macondo to never be seen