Summer Essay- One Hundred Years of Solitude

Paulo Coelho once said “You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one; each day brings a miracle of its own. It's just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.” In One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, blindness plays a large part in the author’s purpose. As Thomas C. Foster said in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, “He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know,”(201). Although Úrsula was the only blind character in the story, she was also the only one who could truly see. Her blindness actually gave her the ability to see things in a different way. Her family on the other hand, had sight, yet was blind. The town in which they lived started off seeing, yet as they “progressed” they slowly lost their sight in a figurative sense. Each part plays a role in this story of solitude.
When Úrsula was first introduced to the story, she was portrayed as a woman who took good care of her family. She worried about her husband’s love for inventions and science, and occasionally grew angry. She stayed firm to what she wanted, and wouldn’t let her husband change her mind. When José Arcadio Buendía wanted to leave Macondo, she stood her ground, and in the end they stayed. It was said that “José Arcadio Buendía had not thought that his wife’s will was so firm.”(One Hundred Years 13) Úrsula had her sight through all of that. But one day, she noticed her eyes were changing. She dismissed it at first, but slowly realized she was going blind. One might wonder why Márquez would add such a trait to a character. Was it because she was aging? Was that the only reason? In How to Read Literature, Foster says “The author has created a minor constellation of difficulties for himself by introducing a blind character into the work, so something important must be at stake when blindness pops up in a story.”(202) Márquez’s purpose in One Hundred Years was to show how humans acted, and how they essentially never changed. Úrsula’s blindness, which did not factor into the book until about midway through, proved this point. At first, she didn’t notice how similar life was day to day, but upon becoming blind she began to notice routines that people fell into. Márquez wrote “[T]hat day she began to realize something that no one had noticed and it was that with the passage of the year the sun imperceptibly changed position and those who sat on the porch had to change their position little by little without being aware of it.”(248) No one took notice of this before because it was such a small factor. Úrsula’s blindness brought a new type of sight in which she was capable of seeing what no one else could. She began to notice things in her children and in their town that she hadn’t noticed before. Even though she was blind it was said “The watchful Úrsula realized what her son was doing, but she could not stop him.”(258) Even in blindness she is still “watchful.” Before, she was so busy that she wasn’t seeing clearly. She only looked with her eyes. Once she was forced to look with her whole being, eyes excluded, she began to notice other things. “[I]n that impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing.”(248) She, like most other people, was so busy with day to day life, that she couldn’t notice the things she noticed once her sight was gone. Suddenly, the fact that humans were simple and unchanging was clear to her. Only being blind was she able to notice that.
In literature blindness often represents clairvoyance. That being said, sight sometimes takes away from actually seeing the world as it is. Foster wrote “[S]eeing and blindness are generally at issue in many works, even when there is no hint of blindness on the part of windows, alleys, horses, speculations, or persons.”(204) In One Hundred Years, Úrsula was the only physically blind person, yet she was not the only mentally blind one, so to speak. Her entire family, caught up in a web of disasters, generation after generation was blind to the fact that they had any problem at all. Not only that, but some members, such as Rebecca, further blinded themselves in ways other than sight just to escape something unpleasant. Upon the death of her husband, she becomes a hermit, talking only to her servant. She turned bitter, and blinded herself to the world and it’s goings on. The blindness of the family shows that they are all too busy with their lives, and so wrapped up in their predestined fate that they cannot even notice what they are doing and what is becoming of them. The repetition of names in One Hundred Years is a prominent topic that shows that point. Children from one generation share the names of the adults from the previous. They all seem to fall into the same trap, messing up in the same ways. Aureliano went to Pilar Ternera when he was disappointed by the rejection of his aunt. He told Pilar, and she “let out a deep laugh, the old expansive laugh that ended up as the cooing of doves. There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendiá that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone spinning into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.”(396) Each generation makes the same mistake, yet they are all too blind to notice what they are doing. They are blinded by sight. Just as blindness caused Úrsula to see, sight caused her family to become blind to their surroundings.
As if following their original leader’s family, the town of Macondo began as a town that could see and think of their own accord, but was soon blinder than a cave full of bats. Their blindness proved that they were so obsessed with advancing as a society that instead of opening their minds, it had the reverse effect. Originally, the town was happy the way they were. They wanted to take no part in a government and they were content with what they had. Once the gypsies came to town, they began to grow more curious about inventions. When the railroad came, that is when they began to go downhill instead of further progress. The town felt that “there was not much time to think about [the lawyers who arrived], however, because the suspicious inhabitants…barely began to wonder what the devil was going on when the town had already become transformed into an encampment of wooden houses with zinc roofs inhabited by foreigners who arrived on the train from halfway around the world…” (226) Everything happened in such a flurry that they were blind to the changes that were taking place. Instead they were wrapped up by motion pictures, and telephones. The final blow came during the banana factory conflict. As thousands of people gathered at the train station, a lieutenant told them they must withdraw, or else they would open fire. The town didn’t withdraw and the guns went off, leaving José Arcadio as the sole survivor. Later, he managed to make his way towards a woman’s home, where he said “’There must have been three thousand of them.’… ‘What?’ ‘The dead,’ he clarified. ‘It must have been all of the people who were at the station.’ … ‘There haven’t been any dead here,’ [the woman] said.”(308) Blind to the massacre that has happened, people turn the other cheek when they hear about the deaths. They have been brainwashed by society, and what it seems to offer. The once friendly town lost everything, and could not see what they were doing.
Blindness was a prominent topic in One Hundred Years, proving that sometimes when one loses their sight they end up with much more. As Foster wrote, referring to a story similar to Márquez’s, “He has acquired a level of vision he never had when he was sighted. Blind as he is, he walks toward that death without assistance, as if guided by an unseen power.”(206) Just as Úrsula was able to grow stronger when sight was taken away from her, the influence of society blinded all the others. In that way, Márquez was able to show how blinded people are by technology.