Summary by chapters of One Hundred Years of Solitude chapters 1 to 4

Summary by chapters of One Hundred Years of Solitude, chapters 1 to 4

Chapter One

Everything takes place in a town in Colombia, called Macondo. The story begins with José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula Iguarán. Crucial characters such as Melchiades, a gypsy leader who sold Joseph Arcadio very strange objects, also feature, and he is also a connoisseur of the mysteries of Alchemy.

José Arcadian bought from Melchiades a magnet that finds gold; equally, a super powerful magnifying glass and some particular navigational elements. He wanted to know other villages and that is why he undertook such excursions, in which he discovered that the village of Macondo was completely surrounded by water.

The fruits of the marriage between José Arcadio and Ursula Iguarán were his two sons: José Arcadio and Aureliano. Every year the gypsies appeared with their magical and strange objects. For that year recounting the end of chapter one, Melchiades dies and his gypsy subjects take the ice to Macondo, never before known in the region.

Chapter Two

José Arcadio and Ursula were cousins and lived in the Sierra, before arriving in the lands of Macondo. It was feared by the beliefs of the inhabitants of that place, that when two cousins married, a son with a pig’s tail came out. But that didn’t happen that way.Also recounted is a duel to the death that José Arcadio had against his neighbor Prudencio Aguilar, in which the former killed the second. However, Aguilar’s ghost was constantly appeared to José Arcadio.

Due to this situation, the newly married couple decides to leave the Sierra and leave, towards the banks of the river, where they founded the village of Macondo. He then narrates the affairs that the young José Arcadio junior maintained with Pilar Ternera, who was a python who was dedicated to reading the letters and became pregnant with him and had a daughter named Amaranta.

Pilar Ternera was a gypsy who mobilized with the group of Melchiades and who one day, passing through Macondo and crossing the view with José Arcadio Junior, fell in love. Then the young José Arcadio, after having his daughter, went with the gypsies and Ternera, abandoning his own,so Ursula decided to go and look for them by heaven and earth, while José Arcadio Grande took care of his son and granddaughter. Ursula failed in his attempt to find his fugitive son, but he found good friends by the way and took them to Macondo.

Chapter Three

Ursula and José Arcadio did not want at all their granddaughter Amaranta, having been the fruit of the union between the gypsy Ternera and her son, even called her Arcadio, as if she were a child.She appears in the story Visitation, an Indian exiled by the plague of insomnia, who came to town and was welcomed by the Buendía and dedicated to caring for the children of that house.

The following year, as usual, the gypsies appeared, but they did not go with José Arcadio junior. The family was getting great, because together with the gypsies they traveled some fur dealers, who left them in the care of a small one, who carried a letter written by an acquaintance of them, requesting the care and protection of the girl, since she had no parents or close family.

Rebekah, thus baptized the minor, who brought the disease of sleep and infected her for Macondo and only a medicine of Melchiades manages to dispel it. A dispute was presented between an fixer who came to Macondo and tried to force the Buendía to paint his house blue, but José Arcadio prevented it at all costs and not only that, but also imposed special conditions to stay in the village.

Chapter Four

Ursula had decided to expand the house and made some remodels. When the work was finished, they wanted to celebrate and bought a pianola, an instrument until now unknown to the place. That’s when Pietro Crespi, a guy from Italy, appears who immediately falls in love with Remedios, The Corregidor’s daughter, but Amaranta falls in love with him. However, the European one is for Remedios and sets a date to marry.

Amaranta was bent on obstructing what that wedding between Remedios and Crespi would lead to. Observing her granddaughter’s intentions, Ursula sends her on a trip. Another part of the chapter recounts the funeral of Melchiades, who drowned in the river and opened the Macondo cemetery.

Pilar Ternera as she also stayed in Macondo and the only one who fled was José Arcadio junior, tired of her husband’s expectation, began to have sex with Aureliano, who in turn is hopelessly in love with Remedios, but intended to calm his coffers for her, sleeping with her sister-in-law.

Aureliano confessed his love for Remedios to Pilar and Pilar decided to collaborate with him by organizing nothing more or nothing less than the wedding between Remedios and Aureliano.