My Intro Paragraph for 100 Years of Solitude Paper (Thesis in Bold)

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a story profuse with complex symbolism and paradoxes.  Pilar Ternera is a character in the novel with a strange, yet vital role.  Although she is portrayed as a whore, Pilar is actually more of a mother to the boys who she sleeps with than a genuine prostitute.  She seems to have taken the place of Úrsula in the Arcadio family’s boys’ lives.  José Arcadio, Aureliano, and Arcadio all have a common attraction to this woman.  Incest was a more acceptable  in those times in South America, so, the fact that someone like Arcadio desperately wishes to have sex with his own mother would not be all that unusual of a desire.  All of the Arcadio boys (and Arcadio) want their mother while they want to have sex.  However, Pilar acts on this general desire among the boys, not for her own pleasure, but in reality to make “her boys” happy.  The relationship that Pilar has with the Arcadio boys is not a purely sexually one.  Surprisingly, it is more of a maternal bond.

Why Memory Loss?

Well, in Chapter 2 when the entire town of Macondo contracts an insomnia disease that ends up turning into a sever memory loss for everyone infected with the disease.  At first, the people of Macondo are completely content with insomnia because it allows everyone to get more work done at a more moderate pace, then the people's memory begin to go.  However, this memory loss plague is much more symbolic than it first appears.  One major theme of the book is solitude.  I feel that this memory loss that inflicts the town is representative of that theme.  When someone loses their memory to that degree, then they are not going to able to recognize anyone except maybe themselves.  That means, that in a way, they're in complete solitude/isolation because they know no one; all a person has is oneself. People who know no one are completely alone.  Therefore, in my opinion, GGM choosing to have the characters of his story to contract a memory loss illness was not a coincidence.  The sickness was simply following a theme in the book.  I am sure the readers will continue to see more of these big events relating to solitude.  I can't wait to keep reading this book, it is my favorite piece that we've read thus far!

My first reaction to "Pedro Paramo"

First off, this book is really different from what we have been reading throughout the year.  Rulfo used several literary techniques to help explain any holes/misunderstandings in the plot.  He switches from the first person to the third, and switches between the past and present times.  This magic realism-styled story is about a man who is trying to find his long lost father.  He travels to the town that his mother left after marrying his father.  The man talks to many of specters of former in habitants of that town, Comala.  When the story switches to the third person it is in the past tense, it talks about the man's father, Pedro Paramo.  Paramo had taken all of the narrator's mother territory.  I am extremely excited to see where this book takes me, so far Rulfo has proved to me that he is a really interesting and talented author.