Wow this novel is truely in its own category. Overall I found the novel to be interesting, yet confusing at times with the repetition of character names. The ending of the novel was profound. I think that what Marquez was trying to protray in the novel was that everything is a mirage and that you should not wait hundred years to do somthing becuase life is “too short” (although in the Buendia’s life it felt like forever), I feel life is like a dream so you should live in the moment because once you wake you u can not do anything about it. I feel this is what he was trying to say. Also I found it interesting that near the end of the novel when Aureliano was taking to people they did not believe that the story behind Colonel Aurlieano Buendia existied, and this just shows how their reality was being questioned. This novel points at the boundaries of realitity and fiction. The novel was set in a fictional land which was surounded by known cities (Arizona, Michigan, & Kentucky) and languages (ex. Sanskrit) that are reality in our world . I found this was cleaverly done. Also, Ursula when she was near death was in a stage of confussion beteween present for her reality and the past which for the rest of the family was fiction; so she also struggled to keep the two worlds straight and to convince her family memebers the past was reality. I found it interesting that the life of Ursula was parallel to the life of their house; it seemed when Ursula was declining so was the house with the weeds and being in pertetual mess. The house was constantly being fixed up near the end of the novel which was interesting, but I am not sure if it had to symbolize how the city was declining in solitude. It seemed as though everyone left the city by the end of the novel, but a necessarily twist was that the incest child of Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula had a pig tail. I thought it was necessary because they talked about it throughout the novel and up until then not one person had one. After all the deaths, masacar, and diseases I thought that nature was rebutling to the changes by having that long rain storm, which was interesting because that was a time in the novel where everyone kept buisy and was not in solitude despite being locked in the house. So I guess this city did get affected by many modernizing changes and we saw the negative effects that occured as a result as well.
