Active Reading Chapter 20

"Pilar Ternera died in her wicker rocking chair during one night of festivities as she watched over the entrance to her paradise." She is the oldest person in Macondo. The few people that lived in Macondo are beginning to live, the bookstore owner moves to the Mediterreanan. He advises the many to leave too, only a few heed his advise. Macondo becomes of ghost town, only a people live there now and the town is infested with bugs. Gaston, tired of waiting for a airplane, catches a ride with some Germans to Brussels. With Gastons absence, Amaranta and Aureliano can love each other without fear. From their love they later bare a child, name Aureliano by Aureliano. The baby is examined by the midwife and a pig tail is found on the baby. Amaranta dies 24 hours of blood loss from the pregneacy. Aureliano, depressed by the death of Amaranta, drinks constantly and neglects his child. To his horror, Aureliano sees child on the front lawn; "It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden." This reminds Aureliano of the final line of Melquiades parchment. Aureliano finds out that the parchment was just his family history. Aureliano does not read the rest of the parchment because"for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

Magical Realism: Ants taking over the town, Melquiades predictions, and the town being destroyed by a hurricane.

Theme: History is man's worst enemy

Character Development: Aureliano is a loser, who should have listened to the bookstore owner.
Quotes: "They were not alarmed. Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula were not aware of the family precedent, nor did they remember Úrsula’s frightening admonitions" They due not know of the family curse

"Amaranta Úrsula’s passionate blood was insensible to any artifice that did not come from love." Amaranta will not bleeding after the baby is born.


Random Quotes: "I shit on Canon Twenty-seven of the Synod of London."

"While he would rub Amaranta Úrsula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats."