One Hundred Years Of Solitude Essay

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, centers around characters of the Buendia family with not only the same first names, but also similar traits to those of their ancestors. Although studying these identical pasts is an important part of understanding the overarching theme of solitude, it also helps to examine the development of characters whose futures are not following that of an ancestor. One such character whose past is also worthy of being examined, is that of someone that is not from the original Buendia family, but rather that of woman that is brought in to the family through marriage. Her name was Fernanda del Carpio, and she married a fourth generation Buendia named Aureliano Segundo. Fernanda’s fairy-tale

Fernanda begins her life with the illusion of belonging to a line of royalty as a result of the way her parents raised her. The narrator proves this point by saying that “Until the day of her wedding she dreamed about a legendary kingdom, in spite of the fact that her father,” (222) Don Fernando, has to mortgage their home "in order to buy her trousseau,” (222) which means an outfit, in simpler terms. The narrator then continues to write, “it was not innocence or delusions of grandeur. That was how they had brought her up,” (222). Readers may speculate about the truth behind whether or not Fernanda wholeheartedly believed this lie for so long, but this situation is believable once placed into context with the solitude that she was placed in as a child. For most of her life, Fernanda is kept inside her home and when she does begin to attend school at a convent, she is separated from the rest of the children and treated differently by the nuns which leads even her classmates to believe that she is royalty. Fernanda’s solitude as a young child made those around her believe the story, much like her classmates at the convent, who “believed this because she was already the most beautiful, distinguished, and discreet girl they had ever seen,” (223). At the end of her eight years of schooling though, Fernanda returns to find her home completely desolate. “All that was left was the furniture that was absolutely necessary, the silver candelabra and table service, for the everyday utensils had been sold one by one to underwrite the costs of her education.” (223). Even after the death of Fernanda’s mother, her father continued to be so invested in continuing her fairy-tale that he eventually sells all their remaining valuables in order to fund her education. All this is shattered though, when a man comes to take her away and