One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcнa Mбrquez

Modernism takes place everywhere, and happens to everyone at some point in time or another. Modernism is the advancement of art, music, technology, imagination and humanity. It is a struggle for some to embrace the future when the advancements of the future bring so much change. People by nature require stability or some sense of control over their lives. The conflict of modernity is that struggle to hold on to tradition, and the impossibility of a compromise, in which elements of both would be lost. To be modern is to embrace the advancement but never let go or forget past accomplishments from which, the advancement would not have taken place. There are rules in order for modernism to survive and not destruct itself. Everything in moderation is a very important aspect. To be creative and ambitious leads to advancement, to be too ambitious and lose sight of what’s important leads to destruction. The novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcнa Mбrquez, is both a modernist novel by the way it is written and the story within. The main conflict in the novel is the struggle between tradition and modernity and excess and power.

The novel is written in a genre of magical realism. Marquez writes in a way where the reader needs to suspended their beliefs and disbeliefs and take what is said as the truth of how it is being experienced by the people. Even if a priest can levitate himself, or a child can be born with a pig’s tale, in every story there is some truth, it is all a matter of perspective. The way in which Marquez wrote the novel with its unique, real verses magic, elements makes it a modernist novel. The whole story of the Buendias and Macondo, is a story of a village and it’s people encountering modernism for the first time. We can’t help but think that Marquez does not think of modernism as a good thing, because in as many forms that it reaches Macondo, Modernity becomes destruction for them.

Macondo is a small isolated village founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran. The whole novel is based on modernism slowly but surely reaching the village, taking over the village and it’s destruction of the village. As Melquiades says, “Science has eliminated distance.” Since Macondo is thought to be isolated, the rest of the world has advanced so it was just a matter of time until modernity found the village. The gypsies were at first the only link Macondo had to the outside world. They brought many new and interesting inventions to Macondo, but no one took them more seriously then Jose Arcadio Buendia. Jose Arcadio Buendia was the first to realize that too much ambition leads to destruction. He was also the first to embrace modernism to the fullest, but he forgot to keep his feet rooted to the present and practically went mad.

The second wave of modernism to hit Macondo was the emergence of the railroad. Modernity can be both good and bad. As modernism approaches the village in stages new