Summer Reading Essay How To Read Literature Like A Professor vs. One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Vanessa Gaston
8/26/08
AP English Literature

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster
& One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s use of weather varies throughout the novel and at the same time provides the reader with more than just a setting, but symbolizing how life in the small village of Macondo changed in its usual ways rather than the physical changes. In Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, he goes on to elaborate on the meanings of different types of weather, which correspond to life in Macondo. Rain and sunshine are well associated with One Hundred Years of Solitude and can apply Thomas Foster’s symbols of rain and shine to these weather changes.

Foster believes that rain is a form of precipitation that if “you want a character to be cleansed, symbolically, let him walk through the rain to get somewhere,” (Foster 77). When Foster mentions cleansed, he is implying the sort of rebirth of a character or when their “filth” is washed away from them by the rain, usually in a dramatic or significant scene. In Marquez’s novel, Aureliano Segundo, the unfaithful, unwilling, and sluggish husband of Fernanda, is stuck in Ursula, his great grandmother’s home, where Fernanda lives. He would rather be in the home of his concubine, Petra Cotes, where he can be at peace. It has been raining in Macondo for a couple of years and so Aureliano has been stuck with his wife most of the time. Unfortunately, most of the time they are speaking is to yell and fuss at one another. But, the minor trips he’s taken to Petra Cotes allowed the

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rain to touch and anoint him because when he returned back to Fernanda, he decided to start “repairing the many things that needed fixing around the house…and no one knew whether because of the involuntary exercise…or the imposed abstinence, but his belly was deflating little by little…until he became less pachydermic all over…” (316). To this conclusion the rain transformed him in two totally different ways. One way was that he finally put himself to use and repaired all the furniture in the Buendia household that needed repair—the ones that Fernanda was constantly nagging him about. Because of their twisted relationship, Aureliano never liked to listen to Fernanda. But, all of a sudden he’s taking time off to do what she’s been asking him to do. The second way that he changed was physically. Aureliano was a recreational man. He loved to throw parties with kegs of beer with his friends and he also enjoyed eating, to the point where his unhealthy lifestyle almost led to his death. He was indeed a very large man, buy because of the rain, he started losing weight and retrieving his twin brother’s looks again—the way he used to be, too.

Though it rained for an exaggerated amount of time in Macondo, a little more than four years straight, it still reminds readers of the biblical story Noah’s Ark, also mentioned in Foster’s notes. God let it rain for forty days and forty nights, but he saved Noah by telling him to build an ark for him and his family, along with every animal species. Foster believes that the flood was a symbol of how the rain eradicated the earth but after it was over, it left behind the opportunity for a new beginning with everything. In Macondo, there was a great strike against the banana company established by

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newcomers in Macondo. The three or more people that were in the crowd, among them women and children, awaited for the army men to fire upon the angry people. The crowd was warned and unexpectedly, the army really did fire upon the crowd, not caring who was hit. The massacre ended with only a few survivors, Jose Arcadio Segundo, twin brother of Aureliano Segundo, was one of them. The dead bodies were loaded onto a train cart and no evidence of the strike was available. The army and company denied the whole protest so those that were not there had to take their word for it. Another factor that contributed to this sudden loss of history was of course the rain. “It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days,” (Marquez 315). The rain washed away all remnants of the massacre. The bloodshed and what it stood far was swept away by the rain. It affected Macondo because a part of their past will never be remembered. Jose Arcadio Segundo attempted to plead what really occurred in the strike but not one person believed him, except maybe his family.

Last, the four year period of rain not only wiped away memories but also rejuvenated the town to what it used to be with sunshine to celebrate it with. “…a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones…” (Marquez 1). Before the rain, people from distant places attempted to establish a government system but was but to a stop by Jose Arcadio Buendia. Gypsies came in with their new devices from their travels. Railroads and ships were built all throughout Macondo connecting the once hidden and virgin town to the outside world. All of these new developments at the time seemed like they would have a positive affect

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on the village but instead it corrupted it. But after the rain, Macondo was a disaster but there were some that favored the rebirth of Macondo. “The survivors of the catastrophe, the same ones who had been living in Macondo before it had been struck down by the banana company hurricane, were sitting in the middle of the street enjoying their first sunshine…but in their hearts they seemed happy to have recovered the town in which they had been born,” (Marquez 331). The quote speaks for itself when it comes to having the old Macondo back. Agreeably, Macondo was left in a wreck but that just meant that all of the new technologies, advancements, and to sum it up, the corruptions, are all gone. As for the sunshine, it just celebrated the fact that the old Macondo was revived by the rain.

As it all comes down, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude had the perfect examples that further elaborated Thomas Foster’s notes on weather, especially that of rain. Precipitation is not only there to create a setting but there are reasons as to why the author chose to put it in that exact scene or portion of the book. Marquez didn’t choose rain randomly. There were symbols behind it. Rain was an essential factor that contributed to how Macondo changed from a sacred village, to an invaded town, and back to a village again.