100 Anos de Solidad V

Ok so after the massacres we get five years of rain. The rain is another way Márquez plays with time. The great rain/flood kind of reminds me of the Biblical flooding of the world with Noah. In the Bible this flood was ordered by God to kill all the wicked and restart life anew—or simply put forgetting the old people and moving on (sound like the massacres yet?) Not only does the rain serve as a symbol of forgetting the past, but it also serves to wash away all traces of the past. God flood the world and man had to start again with nothing, no traces or signs of the old world, much like Macondo is going to have to essentially start over (that is if they weren't all sinners, yep, they're all screwed and are going to drown in the flood.)

The other cool thing in the book is the manipulation of time. The decoding of Melquíades' book collapses the entire history of Macondo into a single instant (or at least so it seems) Although the novel pretty much appears to be written in chronological order, there are hints of playing with this notion of time. Ghosts appear, people disappear and reappear, and deaths and destruction seem to be foreshadowed almost always. The past in this book dictates the future, and often it seems that the past occurs in the future (take the whole pigs tail thing). This whole notion of time seems to be altered with the entire towns almost instant amnesia after every single event. The idea of time is both linear and cyclical in this novel and therefore very fluid. It can unravel in a single instant, like Melquíades depicted, the family is physically moving forward while at the same time spiraling in circles.