Daniel Sega

Latin America Humanities

Sunni Witmer
12 March 2012
Are a Hundred Years of Solitude All That Bad?
Solitude, a feeling that we might relate to sadness, nostalgia or
boredom, is something that its not included in the perfect happiness idea we
learn when we are told fairy tales as children, or in the ideal plan that society
has for everyone, in which we study, get a job, get married, have kids and live
happily ever after. No, its not on the plan, but it is a protagonist in all the
important phases of our lives as it is necessary for the development of the self.
It is normally a rejected and sometimes feared feeling, which many associate
with failure and depression, but is it really something bad? Is it possible to see
solitude without that negative connotation? For the Buenda Family in the book
Cien Aos de Soledad from Gabriel Garca Mrquez, it is. The unconventional
family of this fictional novel, for over a hundred years and more, has seen to
befriend solitude, which Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes as a privilege
(266). With his book, he delivers this powerful idea in the best way possible:
solitude is not only good but is indispensable for a life lived freely.
Humans, as heard animals, search for company from a very young age.
We seek in society emotional fulfillment and positive feeling with our peers. But
every fulfillment that we cant obtain from society we often seek it within
ourselves, in solitude. Some fulfill themselves completely with good company,
some reject solitude as something negative, but unusual people, as the
members of the Buenda family, can only find fulfillment in solitude.
The Buenda family comes to existence from an unusual event for
todays modern west society standards: the incest relation of Jos Arcadio
Buenda and rsula. They seem immune to any formalism and arent attached
to any norm of idiosyncrasy dictated by society, as they create at a relative

young age their own society: Macondo. Through the whole book, the Buenda
just do what they think as things come up without any conventional plan in
mind, and without any must be idea of how their life should go. Raised like
this, they become coronels of a revolution, 70 year old virgins, incest
concubines, alchemist and syndicate leaders; they marry with children and
practice zoophilia. As the Buenda let their mind and their actions fly, most of
them end up in solitude. Every mans and womans mind is unique, and the
Buenda found no need or sense in controlling theirs, or in searching a life of
eternal company. When this type of freedom is possible, solitude doesnt only
becomes imperative for such unique persons, but the only way to reach a
lasting tranquility, and so a privilege, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes it.
The truth is that their goal never was to fill their loneliness and seek a life
lasting companion, but to satisfy the needs of their jumpy soul.
Nowadays, thanks to globalization and technology, our minds grow filled
with ideas that arent our own and generate new ones in relation to the values
learned, passed to us from our relatives or peers. Modern society doesnt find
solitude desirable as some member of the Buenda family do. It is known that
the ways we live our life and the values we have (the things that we should
consider desirable) are dictated by our culture and society, and the flexibility of
this pre-conceived ideas also depends in the idiosyncrasy of the people that
conforms your community. Historically, Latin America has been a place where
the people live their life disobeying conventionalisms of society. In this way,
white Spaniards, Amerindians and Blacks conceived the people of Latin
America; for Spaniards, having relations with Black and Indian women wasnt
something desirable, and viceversa, but it became desirable in Latin America.
In a way, Latin America gave the Amerindians, the Africans and the Europeans

the opportunity to redefine how life should be lived, as Jose Arcadio Buenda
did when he funded Macondo.
Todays Latin America society still is flexible and accepts new ideas and
different values, as it was created by people that also created their own values.
While these characteristic gives the people freedom it is also a dangerous one,
generating anarchy and numerous revolutions throughout Latin America
history. This fate, that has given us fatal and absurd events, close relatives of
the ones occurred in Cien Aos de Soledad, also has given our continent a longlasting solitude. We cant be comprehended easily. We cant be analyzed in the
eyes of other societies that have a more strict systems of beliefs and values to
which our dynamic nature is consider a treat. And even less can we be
analyzed by ethnocentric societies that use their values as reference systems
of what should or should not be the behaviors of humans.
If we provide humans with a free mind in a society that is unattached
from preconceived ideas, the possibility of becoming extraordinary grows
exponentially, and with this uniqueness also comes an insatisfaction with the
fulfillment we can find in our peers; finally, solitude becomes desirable to bear
with our own minds. Solitude is then, a requisite for freedom, and, being a trait
of a continent that was made from the free mind of its people, it can be the
source of human creativity and progress, but also the source of instability,
social unrest and unimagined calamities. In the end we can see that solitude
can not only by good and desirable, but indispensable for the creation of
different worlds with different values, different ideas and different possibilities,
making possible the evolution of the human mind.

Work Cited
Garca Mrquez, Gabriel. Cien Aos de Soledad. Vintage Espaol. 1st Edition.
New York. 2003.