Present, past and future in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is the time linear or not?

UNIVERSITY OF MIANWALI
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
BS ENGLISH
Session: 2017-2021
Semester VIII Regular

Course Title: American Drama

Teacher: Ma’am Shaista Hassan

Assignment Title:“Present, past and future in One Hundred Years of Solitude,

is the time linear or not?”

Submitted By:
 Aatika Asad (BENF17MM032)
 Muhammad Salahudin (BENF17MM051)
 Iqra Zaka (BENF17MM041)
 Awais Talha (BENF17MM056)
 Aleena Tariq (BENF17MM048)
 Uzair Bilal (BENF17MM016)
 Shaista Gul (BENF17MM053)
 Tahir Maqsood (BENF17MM040)

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 Present, past and future in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is the time linear or not?

INTRODUCTION

One Hundred Years of Solitude is famous novel of Postcolonial era. The story sets
in Columbia and covers a time span of 100 years during which the story of seven
generations is discussed. Here our major concern is whether the time is linear or
not in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In this regard it could be said that this novel
contains several ideas concerning time.

TREATMENT OF TIME IN THE NOVEL

Although the story can be read as a linear progression of events, both when
considering individual lives and Macondo's history as a whole, but at the same
time several other interpretations of time can also be done. As we can see that
apparently the treatment of time in this novel is chronological and linear enough
but it also shows abundant zigzags in time. For this purpose the techniques of
flashback, repetition and imagination are used here.
There is a deep connection of two dominant themes of this novel with each other;
magic Realism and unusual treatment of time.

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

As far as the past is concerned, there is the inevitable and inescapable repetition
of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the
complexity of time. Many characters are haunted by their past.
For instance,
The names that return generation after generation, the repetition of traits in
family and events, don’t let the time to divide neatly into past, present, and
future. New children turn out to be like their fathers and carry similar traits. As
Colonel Aureliano is obsessed by same desperation and vague fear of destiny as
his afther and he aslo stays in laboratory for much time.
Moreover, the presence of the ghosts of Melquíades, Prudencio Aguilar and José
Arcadio Buendía show that the past in which those men lived has become one
with the present. This points towards the mingling of past with present.

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 Present, past and future in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is the time linear or not?

In addition to this, there is no clear boundary drawn between the present and
future in this novel. Similar to past, the future is also related at many moments.
For instance, the prophecies of Melquíades prove that events in time are
continuous; from the beginning of the novel, the old gypsy was able to see its
end, as if the various events were all occurring at once.
In this village the oldest and the person who lived long is Ursula. So Úrsula
Iguarán is always the first to notice that time in Macondo is not finite, but, rather,
moves forward over and over again. Sometimes, this simultaneity of time leads to
amnesia, when people cannot see the past any more than they can see the
future. Other times the future becomes as easy to recall as the past.

RELATION OF TIME WITH THE COMPOSITION OF THE NOVEL

There is a strong effect of García Márquez’s decision not to number his chapters is
to make readers think of the book as a single entity whose twenty unmarked
subdivisions exist not as discrete segments but interlinked members in a unitary
whole: one text. Things never stop happening throughout the novel but time
ceases at the final point.

With the mentionng of events of past, present and future, Gabriel García Márquez
develops a feeling of circularity of time by manipulating a linear, forward-moving
timeline with flashbacks, backstory, and background information provided by the
narrator to catch the reader up to the present plot. By including the ghosts of
characters, forshadowing and prophecies.
Thus time in this novel is subject to large-scale shifts in narrative. The story starts
from Jose Arcadio I, so the narration must have been started from there, but
rather the narrative started fron Aureliano belonging second generation. Thus the
previouss tory is reveale to su in the form of flasbacks.

IRREGULARITY OF TIME
As far as the characters of the novel are concerned, the time alternatively moves
quickly and stagnates for years. For instance, the children grow up quickly, but
when they are adults; particularly the male adults, time abandons them leaving
them to sit with their own nostalgia and bitterness for years till end. Another
strange thing is that no body gets older than 30 years, so Ursula from first
generatuon was alive till end and she observed everything happening around her.
Time abandons Colonel Aureliano Buendia , and Jose Arcadio Segundo, as both of
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 Present, past and future in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is the time linear or not?

them keep themselves locked in Melquiades' laboratory, refusing to join the

living, moving world. Here Marquez's reason of demosntrating that time moves in
circles and cycles somehow gives a clue that time goes on passing but people are
not always progressing. In this case it is visible that time is indeed moving in a
circle in this book, but instead of expanding outward it is collapsing in on the
Buendia family. The novel explores the issue of timelessness or eternity within
the framework of mortal existence, such that the laboratory was first designed
by Melquíades near the start of the story and remains essentially unchanged
throughout its course.

STAGNATION AND LACK OF PROGRESS

Their is an unusual treatment of time in this novel; appparently a century passes
but their is no material progress or visible change in the lives of the people of
Macondo. As the novel started with a destructed island and upon the end it is
again a destructed and devasteted island wityh no life. So this could be said that
the notion of the circularity of time discussed by the autor in this novel is
somehow relateble with the overall theme.
Thus at one moment they said:
“What did you expect,” murmured José Arcadio Segundo. “Time passes.”
“That’s how it goes,” Úrsula said, “But not so much.”
“When she said it, she realized that she had given the same reply that Colonel
Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with
the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was
turning in a circle.” (P. 361)

In order to conclude it could be said that the characters of this novel are
somehow haunted by their past. The decisions, history, ghosts, prophecies,
events etc. all are play some role in their lives. Resultantly their nostalgia
complicates the future of them. That conclusion is both an expression of the
author’s sense of humor and his philosophy of life, for in Macondo, life continues
from one generation to the next by a kind of translation of the same message, the
same events, and the same characters. The novel’s ending is partly ambiguous
because we many events happening in the novel are either repeated or are
foreseen and there are constant shifts in time that seem as natural as the course
of a human life. so the treatment of time is not linear but it has a zigzag pattern.