You must post 2 times before Monday,November 15th. Your first post must be submitted by Thursday, November 11th. It should be in response to one of the prompts below. The second time you post, it must be in response to or in reaction to the post of another student.
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude is seeped in symbolism, allegory, hyperbole and parable. (These literary terms are defined below.) Why do you think Gabriel Garcia Marquez chooses to write his narrative in this way? Choose an aspect of the novel that makes use of one of the aforementioned literary devices then attempt to give meaning to it.
Symbolism: a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it
Allegory: a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is personification. In written narrative, allegory involves a continuous parallel between two or more levels of meaning in the story. An allegory may be conceived as a metaphor that is extended into a structured system.
Hyperbole: Exaggeration for the sake of emphasis
Parable: A brief tale intended to be understood as an allegory illustrating some moral or lesson.
2. Choose a particular character to evaluate. Determine whether the character traits you have noted are ultimately positive or negative, or both. Explain your reasoning. For example Jose Arcadio Buendia: He is inventive and spends many hours alone on his alchemy experiments trying to discover already known science. This is ultimately negative, because he isolates himself from his family and eventually goes mad.
3. Identify elements of the story that you find particularly confusing, interesting, or worthy of discussion. Pose your own questions. Include portions of the text that you feel contribute to your questions/your point. Cite page numbers.
I thought that the section we had to read for this week really expanded our character list as well as the entire war situation. There was a lot to keep up with but I like the direction the book is heading. I think we will start to see the effects of the decisions of the Buendia family.
ReplyDeleteIm dominating these message boards. Got to the part in the book where Aureliano is deciding to end the war.... I think hes seen the emptiness of war.. he realizes that there is no winner or loser most of the time, it stays the same. He has become a different person throughout the war, someone who is impersonal and distant, showing the effects war can have on a humans spirit.
ReplyDelete2. Ursula is a the matriarch. She is the core caretaker and leadership role when duty calls. She is caring and generous, opening her home to so many people and treating them all like her own. Her character traits are mostly positive. She is the one of the founders of Macondo and is respected for it.
ReplyDeleteI was confused on page 145 and 146 how it talks about the conservative General Moncada and Colonel Aureliano (liberal) becoming the best of friends, yet they are on opposite sides of the war. If General Moncada considers military men unintelligent, lazy, selfish, and he is completely antimilitarist as said on the 7th line from the bottom on page 145 then how are these two men friends? Aureliano was previously training his son for the military and yet on page 146 it goes on about Moncada and Aurilano talking about coordinating their parties and doing away with the military...is Aureliano for the military side of war or against it and how are they great friends?
ReplyDeleteAmaranta is really a character that stands out to me. She starts off kind of in the background and once Rebeca falls in love with Pietro and they plan on getting married she really steps up and gets kind of vicious and selfish. She goes to desperate measures to prevent the marriage but apparently, to the rest of the characters, she is innocent because they believe her when she denies it. And then she burns herself when Pietro dies because she wouldn't marry him. And now is denying herself of love out of what I think is guilt. She seems like a very dramatic person and that makes an interesting character and turn of events but not really a good person. She takes thing way too far and I think that might play into the element of magic realism in the writing style because her drama is far beyond a real human being and therefore is a hyperbole as well.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning of the book, when all the gypsies visit Macondo and bring all their new inventions, there are lots of parables I think. The different stories about new inventions and how people react. Jose Arcadio Buendia seems to always have to have the latest invention i.e the magnet. I think that the moral lesson that could be taken from his mistakes with it (he never finds anything of value) is that new doesn't necessarily mean better. Still true today
ReplyDeleteI believe JAB being on the tree and talking in Latin, is symbolizing Christ on the cross. I think she writes this way to make us stop and think about what were actually reading and make it connect to something that we've grown up knowing.
ReplyDeleteI think that Ursula is the only truly good character in this book. She is the one character who does what is morally right. In the first half of the book, Ursula is a very loving and compassionate mother figure to her children and her grandchildren. She took Rebeca into her home and cared for her even when she wasn't sure if they were even related. This shows Ursula's true character. Even though she is always loving, she still has high standards that she holds her children to. You see this when she beats Aureliano for being a bad ruler. Overall, I think Ursula is the only thing that holds the Buendia family together.
ReplyDeleteAureliano is a character that I find to me interesting. His nature is different from the start when he is born with his eyes open, and then when he is a child he has a special power and knew the soup was going to fall off the table. When he grows older, he has life expereinces that mold him into the person he becomes. Before Remedios dies, he seems to be a normal guy making his gold fishes and going about his life. However, after her death the war breaks out and he turns into a power hungry leader. After the war is over, he turns back into this character of soliltude and returns back to the one thing that isolates him from the rest of the world (creation of the gold fishes) so he doesn't have to focus on the hardship and pain that he bears.
ReplyDeleteMegan: I agree with what you said about Aureliano, I think that before he met Remedios he wasn't touched by emotions and just kind of went through life day by day and as the war progressed the emotions he started to feel while married to Remedios and after she had died once again disappeared. When he realized the war was only being fought on both sides for pride I think that was the final push back into his emotionless mind. I think that since he had never really had to deal with his emotions when he finally started to experience them in any sense it overwhelmed him and caused the attempt on his own life.
ReplyDeletei agree with jamies post: There are alot of new characters that were just introduced in this book but this book is seeming like its going to turn out good and just keep getting better.
ReplyDeleteMary Kate: I agree, I believe that Ursula is the best character in this book. It's actually surprising how long her character has lasted considering almost everyone from the beginning of the book has died and so many more generations have been born. I wonder how old she really is, and if her character will remain until the end of the book.
ReplyDeleteI think Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book is heavy in symbolism becaue it makes the book more interesting. If he wrote his books in simple, obvious ways it would not be as interesting or as complicated. I think that the symbolism of passing down names is huge. The character possess the same traits and characteristics as the person they are named after. I think this is symbolism that we are all like our ancestors and we will teach our children what we want them to know
ReplyDeleteI agree with Mary Kate. I think that Ursula is the only one that sticks to what is right and to her own values the entire time. She does what she can to help others do the right thing to and she is always looking out for the best interest of her family. I am also shocked like Megan that Ursual hasn't died yet, she is over 100 years old and completely blind, but still taking care of her kids and grandkids.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Ursula is one of the better characters because her personality seems to be the only consistent one. She always seems to be the motherly one in the book trying to fix things and make her kids have a better life.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Mary Kate. Ursula is one of the only truely good characters. She is loving and does what she has to do. I feel like she is kind of the feminist because she runs the house and at one point the town. She takes control of situations and is a really strong woman, all the characteristics of a classic feminist.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what hannah said to some degree...it is important to use symbolism throughout a book to get across a deeper meaning, but that becomes useless when the story is too convoluted with symbolism. I think this book uses a good balance between giving us ideas that we can easily understand, like the fact that advancement brings change to society, and messages that are harder to decipher, like the allusions to Jesus and Sigmund Freud, which try and show human motivation and nature.
ReplyDeleteLike Megan, I also find Aureliano very interesting. He has so many changes of personality in the book and I want to know what is causing them. I wonder if he would have turned out different if his wife hadn't died. Maybe he wouldn't have turned into a power hungry leader..
ReplyDeleteIm going to evaluate Colonel Aureliano Buendia. He was weeping in his mother's womb before he was born and that symbolizes the love he can not endure in his life. Like he will never be able to love. He spends a lot of time at war and fixated on the war itself. He is fighting for his pride. He slept around a lot in his lifetime. Therefore he never had one main love. He came out to have 17 different sons with 17 different women. They were all identified at the point of the book where they went to mass on Ash Wednesday. The ashes became permanent. Also when he came back from war the only person that understood why he acted the way he did was his mother Ursula. He grows to understand he is so far gone from reality that he dies from it.
ReplyDeleteAnd i also agree with Jamie's first statement how the book's characters are expanding, and how its sort of hard to follow, the different names and stuff will explain where and why they all ended up the way they did.
Mary Kate, I think you're right. I think if his wife hadn't died, Aureliano would be different. I think that event took away his capacity to love
ReplyDeleteI think that the banana plantation massacre was a symbol representing the Holocaust. The train was deffinately a symbol representing bringing modernization to Macando.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Hannah to some point. I think their names represent a lot, but not that they're exactly like everyone else. They all have the same names to represent they are the same family and were taught the same foundation, but they still all do very different things.
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