'One Hundred Years of Solitude': Favorites

Who is your favorite character in One Hundred Years of Solitude and why? What is your favorite quote/passage?



Book Club Procedures

I'm going with Aureliano Segundo, he seemed the most fun.

This is a really hard choice. There are those characters that I can easily cross out, Amaranta, the first Jose Arcadio, Fernanda to name a few and then there are those characters that I liked certain aspects of their personalities or liked them during specific phases of their lives but then at other times they drove me nuts. I think the person I admired the most consistantly was Ursula. She was such a strong woman, she never succumbed to the solitude that consumed her family, she never succumbed to the dispair that was so overwhelming to everyone else, she just kept going and taking care of everyone else.

I agree with Idril that it is a really hard choice. Till the last 30 pages of the book, Ursula was my favorite character as well; she seemed like the only one who really kept her feet on the ground and tried her best to keep the family together. She was the most consructive and the least selfish of the bunch, I think.

However, in the last pages I was quite taken with Aureliano as well. He does not seem to have much chance from the very beginning: Growing up without his parents (without even knowing who they were), being kept as a 'prisoner' by Fernanda till he was almost an adult... He seemed to have a depth (and intelligence) that most of the other family members lacked and was also able to love and show some passion for someone other than himself (albeit it was his own auntie).

I think Aureliano Segundo also was able to show love and passion for another person, especially when he was with Petra at the end.

"le había dado sesenta y cinco veces la vuelta al mundo, enrolado en una tripulación de marineros apátridas"

jose arcadio buendia, went sixty five times around the world and came back to macondo cover intattos up to the neck.
ohhh and he made living basically as a gigolo. so yeah he's my favorite character

I also liked Ursula and Aureliano. But I must say that Melquiades was my favorite because I don't know. I don't think One hundred years was his best. As a historian, I find the one on Bolivar extremely accurate. And the most interesting were his short stories because being succint he got a chance to depict that world on its many sides. My favorite quote: "Life is not the one we lived but the one we remember and how we remember to tell it." From his autobiographical stuff.

Amaranta's story is actually quite amazing. She tries to kill her sister Rebecca with laudanum in her coffee because of their rivalry re Pietro de Crespi, and when de Crespi courts her because Rebecca falls for Jose Arcadio, she rejects de Crespi and causes him to kill himself. Later she rejects Gerineldo Marquez and almost falls into a incestuous relationship with a nephew. The most sad story of all the Buendias and the most magnificent, IMO.

The warrior-poet Colonel Aureliano Buendia. I plan on marrying a dark-eyed latin beauty and naming my first born Aureliano.

I vote for the most beautiful woman in the world that was assumed into heaven. I could almost see her with her crew cut and baggy smock. If she'd have met me I'd have ended her childishness.