One of the most striking aspects of One Hundred Years of Solitude is how it manipulates expectations of genre. History, memory, reality and the supernatural are all intertwined and all given an equal amount of credence, although at different points. Instead of offering a traditional or chronological novel, one must quickly adapt to the new style of reading and interpreting a novel in order to allow for the multiple perspectives, lack of logical chronology, and interplay between truth, memory, and what might be considered the unrealistic or magical.
Although this is a complicated text in that sense, once it becomes possible to shed expectations as a reader, the novel unfolds in a way that is natural and begins to read more like a series of digressions that are left to the reader to interpret as either truth, memory, history, and more importantly, subversions and manipulations of any of the elements just listed. One of the ways these confusing but integral aspects of the text can be best seen is through the use of passages that reflect these dichotomies, especially as they occur when the village is on the brink of great changes—which seems to be the times in the novel when the most confusion is present. In general, the reader is much like the adopted character of Rebeca, who mysteriously shows up at the doorstep of the strange family one day and must quickly overcome a vast inability to recognize anything around her and then attempt to try to make sense of the disconnected family she now calls her own.
The very first paragraph of the novel, like other works of magical realism, immediately confuses and disorients the reader and makes it impossible to properly pinpoint what the historical setting for the novel is as well as where the physical location is as it seems at once ancient and modern. The first lines make it clear that the account is from memory, although when the narrator states that Colonel Aureliano Buendia is facing a firing squad, “many years later” when he calls “that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water…The world was so recent that many things lacked names” (Marquez 1). As the book progresses, the same sensation of being on unsure footing in terms of history and its validity when recounted through memory, especially by a group of people who consider their lives to be intimately joined with the supernatural, in great in small ways, often emerges. What the reader is ultimately left with is a tale that is not combines many seemingly opposing elements. The supernatural and the scientific, the historical reality versus convolutions in memory, multiple perspectives and narratives within one absolute narrative, and the overwhelming oppositions between “truth” (as it exists for fictional characters) and omissions due to memory loss, among other things. There is nothing definite in this novel and the problems created by what it notably a part of this memory, which then becomes history, versus the memorable events the reader learns of but that are not remembered as they should be, creates tension that makes it difficult to ascertain how to interpret this text. It is not historical fiction (and certainly not historical non-fiction) although it maintains some resemblances to reality (the invasion of the railroads, the massacre of the banana plantation workers, etc). and it is not a singular family history as far too many voices contend for the reader’s trust. This is a text that is what a reader makes of it; it takes shedding what is already known about general, standard chronological ways of understanding history, reality, and memory simultaneously.
When Rebeca arrives and the town is forced to erect signs to remind them of their own realities, this is a moving moment for the reader as it becomes clear that Rebeca, in many ways, is in the same position as the reader. She must relearn everything she knows, especially now that she has been thrown into a chaotic world and has to come up with a new vocabulary, a new way to understand and navigate the strange place where she lands. Also, like the reader, Rebeca has been ushered into the lives of the family and becomes an intimate spectator and participant through their many struggles and joys. As a character who falls into this world as a blank slate ready for Macondo and the Buendias to write upon her the symbols that make meaning in the world presented, it seems to be a signal to the reader to open up to this setting and allow it to permanently reshape our understanding of time, memory, history, reality, and that which should not exist in a rational world.
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