Active Reading: Chapter One

Chapter One: Active Reading

Quotes
"We still have not had a death...A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."
What's going on here is Jose Arcadio Buendia is trying to convince Ursula that they should leave their home. Ursula is very persistant, and this is Jose's defense against her, that sure you may live there, but it truly is not your home until someone passes away and is buried there. Ursula's rebuttal is: "If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die."
This shows that Ursula feels very strongly about their home and truly wans to stay. At this point, Jose realizes it will be very hard to get to her leave.


Magical Realism
If anything has any magical aspects to them in the first chapter, it would probably be the new technology that Jose Arcadio Buendia is either discovering or inventing. Some have some mystical aspects to them.

Themes
Without even reading the entire novel, it is quite obvious that isolation and conflict will be a major theme throughout this entire book, and in chapter one that statement is supported. Ursula and Jose are arguing on and off, and they are isolated from the every day world due to Jose's "quest for knowledge."

Character Development
We are introduced to Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula. We see that they are both somewhat stubborn, but also have certain things that drive them.

Summary
Chapter one gets the readers aquainted with the main characters and overall tone of the book. Jose Arcadio Buendia is obsessed with obtaining more knowledge in the science field, isolating himself in many ways in the process. Ursual is frustrated with him at many points because of his aspirations, and she is more focused on developing Macondo, the town they organized. Jose, however, wants to leave because he's interested in exploring. This is hard to do because Macondo is surrounded by water, so a conflict arises between he and Ursula. Since he realizes there is nothing he can do because his wife won't let him, he continues his studies there on Macondo.