Pilar Ternera

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One Hundred Years of Solitude Memory is a flimsy thing, and history is written by the victors. Or, as Garcia Marquez, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, puts it, “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” History and memory are among the most important topics that One Hundred Years of Solitude touches upon. The people of Macondo and the Buendia family in particular do not bother to remember their history. Throughout the novel, the family never realizes that they are one unbroken, repeating cycle. Ursula, the matriarch of the Buendia family, is one of the few who ever realizes that with every generation nothing changes and everything repeats. After living for nearly twelve decades, she can only marvel and despair over the endless cycle among the men of her family.
The only other witness to this tragedy of repetition is Pilar Ternera, a women who has, from the beginning of the novel, intimately guided the Buendia men into adulthood. In her last encounter with a Buendia, she realizes: …show more content…
Ursula and Pilar understood what no other characters did, that the axle would eventually have to break. After all, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Knowing this, and knowing that Marquez believes this enough to make it a major theme in his best-loved work, it becomes clear that his own personal history and experiences, as well as the history of his homeland, become an incredibly important part of his novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude could not have been written if not for Marquez’s experiences throughout his
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