Breaking the Cycle: The Importance of Free Will in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude discusses a multitude of complex issues. However, perhaps the most provocative issue discussed is how time seems to repeat itself throughout generations of the Buendia family. Gabo frames the matriarch of the family, Ursula, and a family friend, Melquiades, as the sources of wisdom and perspectives that could prevent the family from repeating mistakes. However, it is the family members’ choices to not listen to Ursula’s better advice that leads to the Buendia family’s eventual downfall. Gabo suggests with the events in One Hundred Years of Solitude that it isn’t fate that causes events to happen; instead, he encourages his readers to take personal responsibility for themselves and learn from the past to build a better future. One Hundred Years of Solitude isn’t about fate, but instead is about exercising freedom in an informed and responsible manner.
When looking at One Hundred Years from a text-self perspective, one of the things I see within myself is my Catholic background and upbringing. I was raised in a Catholic family and am presently a practicing Catholic. Though I am a practicing Catholic, I struggle with the institution of the Catholic Church, particularly with the tradition of elitism through the Latin mass and the lack of transparency of financial and theological practices by the Vatican. In this novel, I saw the Catholic Church theology being respected but the forceful tradition (as depicted in Fernanda) being criticized.
Gabo makes his position on the Catholicism from the very beginning; he is accepting of the faith but not of the institution of the Catholic Church. Colonel Aureliano Buendia spends a decade of his life fighting in a civil war against the priests, but still cannot remove himself completely from the tradition. After receiving a gift of a prayer book from the Colonel once he returns from war, Ursula remarks “how strange men are (…) they spend their lives fighting the priests and then give prayer books as gifts” (Garcia Marquez 162). The next generation of the Buendia family brings into it the forceful presence of Fernanda, an indimidatingly pious woman who holds her faith over the rest of the family member’s heads. Fernanda is a lonely woman who the family works to appease but never relates to on a deeper level. Aureliano Segundo continues to see his mistress, Petra Cotes, and appeases Fernanda by saying that he will make sure to die in their marriage bed and not in Petra’s bed. The family as a whole spends much of their time mocking Fernanda for her staunch Catholicism and took their own measures to deal. “Amaranta felt so uncomfortable with [Fernanda’s] habit of using euphemisms to designate everything that she would always speak gibberish in front of her” (Garcia Marquez 210). Despite Fernanda’s religious fervor, she isn’t the one who receives the miraculous experience. Instead, Remedios the Beauty, the non-traditionalist and nonconformist of the bunch, is the one who ascends into heaven. “Fernanda, burning with envy, finally accepted the miracle” (Garcia Marquez 236). Gabo shows that it isn’t blaent piety that wins the love of God, but living a good, if unconventional, life.
Seeing this evidence of respect for the faith but not for the institution resonated with my struggles. I am reminded of the year that I received my confirmation as a Catholic. My home parish had just finished a remodeling project which I had disagreed with (the church had just been remodeled 10 years before) and now wanted the candidates to contribute money of their own to help the budget deficit. I preferred (and still prefer) to pick my own causes to donate my money to and certainly saw no need to put my hard earned money to a project that I disagreed with. Instead, I questioned (to myself) why my money couldn’t be put toward the community. I never gave money to that particular drive.
I also see a lot of myself and my faith in what I chose to write this paper on. When talking with other people who have read this text, people who weren’t impressed with the text saw the ending as anti-climatic and grim. However, I don’t see the text, and its ending with Aureliano reading his family’s story (Garcia Marquez 415) as grim, but as an optimistic call to action. I see Gabo promoting an intrinsic sense of free will through One Hundred Years of Solitude. Though his characters repeat things time and time again, they have the benefit of better advice, both though Ursula (reason) and Melquiades’s texts (revelation). This is a Catholic way of looking at how we know things. We each have individual experiences which, through those experience’s outcomes, can shed light on whether we should or should not repeat them. However, we also have the Bible, which gives us direction on what we should and should not do. The Buendia family’s downfall occurred because they neither looked toward reason nor revelation on how to act. Instead, they blindly went about a path that had been traveled before – but the key is they had the choice (and the benefit of better advice telling them) not to.
It is often said that families are doomed to repeat their own history – abusers’ children are more likely to abuse, alcoholics’ children are more likely to drink, and children of the obese are more likely to be fat. With this in mind, I turn to the text-text section of this paper. “Cat’s in the Cradle”, by Harry Chapin discusses a father-son relationship from a father’s perspective. The opposing philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger can illuminate both the consequences of this song and of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In “Cat’s in the Cradle”, a father discusses his son growing up and his “absentee parenting” style during those crucial years. In the chorus, his son asks “when you coming home dad?” to which the father responds “I don’t know when but we’ll get together then son/You know we’ll have a good time then” (10-12). The interesting thing about this song is how the son responds to his father’s absence. Throughout it all, he promises “I’m gonna be like you, Dad/You know I’m gonna be like you” (6-7). The song ends with the father calling his son and asking him to spend some time with him. The son has a plethora of excuses that make him unable to come to visit. The father comes to the realization that “As I hung up the phone it occurred to me/He’d grown up just like me/My boy was just like me” (43-45).
Who is to blame in scenarios, like the ones detailed in “Cat’s in the Cradle” and One Hundred Years of Solitude, where families repeat themselves in generational cycles? Are these cycles avoidable or can we, with awareness, transcend these cycles into something better? Nietzsche and Heidegger would respond differently to these questions.
Nietzsche says that “the eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust” (Loeschenkohl 2). Nietzsche sees cyclical history as being defended in particular by the Law of Conservation (energy can neither be created nor destroyed). In addition, “recurrence (…) is not a matter to discuss, nor is there anything that we can do to influence this circular movement” (Loeschenkohl 3). Personal responsibility for your life path is not necessary for Nietzsche; we have no control over these cycles. According to Nietzsche, time and history is doomed to repeat itself over and over again. Human beings have no responsibility for the cycles of history and are helpless to stop it from occurring.
In regards to both “Cat’s in the Cradle” and One Hundred Years, the cycles that are seen both with the father and son and with the Buendia family are inevitable. The Catholic Christian way of looking at this text with Ursula and Melquiades as the two sources of wisdom would be vehemently rejected by Nietzsche; he saw Christianity as slavery to people to make them live conventionally. Instead, he would not only acknowledge the cycles in the families as happening but would in no way hold the family members responsible for taking part in the cycle that lead to their downfall.
Heidegger’s philosophy differentiates between beings and Being. As humans, we have Dasein, or “being for whom there is Being”, or “being that makes issue of its own being” (http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/heidegge.htm). Heidegger says that we get so caught up with everydayness that we forget to live out our full destiny of “being-with” the world, or “being present in the world, in the presence of other transcendent presences in the world” (Johnston 167). For Heidegger, all humans have a choice to make. “Either I have (…) an unexamined mode of existence, or (…) I can choose a mode of existence in which I assume responsibility for my own life” (Johnston 167). "Because the subject must be understood in terms of his authentic potentiality-for-Being; so, the subject is the basis of care and selfhood is possible in the authenticity of Dasein's Being as Care” (Heidegger and Social Theory). In other words, people have the ability to take personal responsibility for their own lives in living in the present within the world.
In response to “Cat’s in the Cradle” and One Hundred Years, Heidegger would say that the cycles that both the father and son and the Buendia family repeated could have been prevented. Heidegger would have turned to both Ursula and Melquiades in One Hundred Years and said that the family members’ Dasein’s should have been more authentically present in the world around them, been aware of both reason (Ursula) and revelation (Melquiades), and made their decisions based on these resources. Heidegger is an idealistic Christian thinker and believes in the notion of free will; by taking personal responsibility for their actions, things could have been different. In “Cat’s in the Cradle”, Heidegger would say that either the father or the son could have noticed the cycle of distance between them and stopped it at any point, if their Dasein had been present. However, none of them made that choice, and suffered as a result.
How would Nietzsche and Heidegger look at the last sentence in One Hundred Years of Solitude? “Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth” blatantly states that the Buendia family was condemned to their ending. Nietzsche would leave this cyclical condemnation as is – the family didn’t have a choice and did they best they could with their lot. However, Heidegger, and myself, would say that the condemnation was self-imposed; by not making the choice to be authentically present and concerned in the world, the Buendia family came to a lonely end.
Gabo’s ideas on the past guiding our free will can enlighten world leaders on how to react to situations put in front of them. September 11, 2001 was a day that will live in infamy for many Americans. Only one other time before (December 7, 1941) had the United States been attacked on our own soil. Terrorist attacks, even on our own citizens, can be ignored by American citizens when they take place on foreign soil. However, once things come closer to home, like during the Pearl Harbor attacks and the attacks of September 11, United States leaders are pressured to act. Gabo would tell our politicians to look to the past to see how to react to terrorist situations in the present.
Despite the Japanese perception of aggression coming from the United States, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the United States reacted strongly. The people of the United States couldn’t conceive an attack on their own soil, yet with the power of aircraft, it happened. Once Pearl Harbor was attacked, the United States had a choice to make – should we or should we not declare war on the Japanese and enter a world conflict that we have been trying to stay out of in the process? The United States made the choice to enter World War II, leading to the death of 300,000 American soldiers. The Japanese were the last of the Axis powers to surrender during World War II. The Truman administration made the decision to drop the atomic bomb once on Hiroshima and once on Nagasaki, leading to even more death and unforeseen health defects for generations to come. “If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries, and unfortunately, many civilian lives will be lost” (Truman Radio Address 8/9/1945). Only after these deadly weapons were put to use did the Japanese surrender and World War II end.
Today, the Unites States has a similar situation on its hands. Despite the continued presence and improvement of aircrafts from the days of Pearl Harbor, not to mention a continued history of imperialistic presence in Middle Eastern countries and the unpopular support of Israel, people of the United States saw an attack on our soil as nearly impossible. When the attacks of September 11th happened, the United States had a choice to make – should we or should we not declare war on terror, particularly the terrorist group (Al-Qaeda) who took responsibility for the attacks? The United States made the choice to enter into a war with an unseen enemy. “Our war begins with Al-Qaeda but it does not end there. It will not end until ever terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated” (Bush Television Address 9/20/2001). This war has resulted in continued strife in Afghanistan. “Expectations are now being lowered across the board and people talk dismissively about the grand vision for the future of Afghanistan as laid out at the Bonn Conference in 2001” (Pannell 2006). In addition, the situation in Iraq is becoming more and more unpopular with the American people, with just 23% of people polled approving of the way the Iraq war was being handled in March of 2007 (Connelly 2007).The United States has had a two front war for seven years now and is looking for the best possible solution to leave Iraq. How should we do this?
This is a very complicated question that the United States can gain insight on by looking at how the Pearl Harbor situation was resolved. Though the United States is well aware of the negative impacts of atomic weaponry, we have yet to shut down our production of them or destroy our stored weapons. Though the United States has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Unites States “has failed to meet America’s NPT obligations and to seize the opportunity to delegitimize nuclear weapons as a tool of foreign and military policy (…) the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), open for signature in 1996, has not been ratified by the United States and other key states, blocking its implementation” (Kimball 1999).
In the past, the United States used an atomic weapon on a country to force surrender. Using that weapon caused much more damage than we could have imagined, both in the present time and in the future generations. The past would tell us that using a weapon of such magnitude can have unprecedented affects. However, the weapon did result in surrender. With the past data, what should the United States do? We certainly have not taken actions to discourage atomic weaponry; while we tell the rest of the world to discontinue production on atomic weapons, we continue to store them up and refuse to sign any agreement to not use them.
When looking at One Hundred Years of Solitude from these various text perspectives, one comes to see that Gabo details a family with a cyclical history, it was not fate but their own obliviousness that led them to a solitary fate. One can see Gabo’s Catholic background as well as his stance on the church in the way that he structures his novel. Nietzsche and Heidegger and their opposing philosophies add another dimension to Gabo’s work by supporting his view of cyclical history, but only if you make unaware choices. Finally, Gabo’s work can advise world leaders on how to react to problems in their countries – look at the past and be aware of what’s occurring in the present. In today’s world, where it is easy to fall into the trap of blaming repeated mistakes on fate, One Hundred Years of Solitude shines a critical light on the power that we ourselves have to control our destiny.