Time does not move in a straight line, rather in a circle; events repeat themselves and people become trapped in the natures of their solitudes. It is up to the character whether they accept their solitude or spend their life in denial. This is evident in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The character Colonel Aureliano Buendia lives a life in solitude, beginning in his childhood into his days as a famous military colonel for the rebel movement and finally as an old man that is living the rest of his days in a seemingly empty shell. In his early life, Colonel Aureliano Buendia feels a love for his family, but as time moves forward and his experiences in the decades of war that he had endured causes him to lose his capability …show more content…
He realizes that “the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude” (199). He took his solitude to a new extreme when he decided to bar the door to his workshop and was never to be seen again except for the rare sightings at the street door where he would sit (228). Like with the ten-foot circle, Colonel Aureliano is using this self-inflicted isolation in his workshop as a way to separate himself from people that care for him and those that he used to love. Colonel Aureliano’s condition only worsens when his seventeen sons are hunted down and murdered; he had begun to develop a sort of love for his children and it is said that, like with the death of his wife, he was not filled with sorrow but instead experienced blind rage (240). This event worsens his incapability of love because just as he is starting to feel his own type of love for a group of people again, they are brutally taken away from him. Upon Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s death, he looked on at the circus and realized his solitude when he saw nothing but the street and air after the circus had passed (267). Colonel Aureliano has realized that he is completely alone, and his inability to love his family and friends has left him that way since he was a young