10/24/08

"When they brought to the table the tiger-striped bunch of bananas that they were accustomed to hang in the dining room during lunch, he picked the first piece of fruit without great enthusiasm. But he kept on eating as he spoke, tasting, chewing, more with the distraction of a wise man than with the delight of a good eater, and when he finished the first bunch he asked them to bring him another. Then he took a small case with optical instruments out of the toolbox that he always carried with him. With the suspicious attention of a diamond merchant he examined the banana meticulously, dissecting it with a special scalpel, weighing the pieces on a pharmacist's scale, and calculating its breadth with a gunsmith's calipers."

This quote is foreshadowing something about to happen. Aureliano Segundo invites a white man in his house to eat dinner, and instead the white man is probably going to take advantage of their new foods, and use them to make a profit back with the other white people. This reveals two major themes in this book: the changing in Macondo over centuries, and also the differences between people of different races. Both of these things are reflected in this quote.

10/17/08

"In a few years, without effort, simply by luck, he had accumulated one of the largest fortunes in the swamp thanks to the supernatural proliferation of his animals. His mares would bear triplets, his hens laid twice a day, and his hogs fattened with such speed that no one could explain such disorderly fecundity except through the use of black-magic"

This quote I think is foreshadowing something bad about to happen. It feels like everything is almost too good to be perfect. The way the author uses mocking diction like all things good happen to a man who is lazy and doesn't deserve it leaves the reader further purpose to believe that something bad is going to happen in the near future. His repetition of 'he' in the beginning of every sentence emphasizes the mocking tone which the author makes it seem like Aureliano Segundo is very conceited in his success. These are all signs the author leaves to make the reader realize that something bad is going to happen in the future.

post 3

"'But I give you one warning: as soon as I see his body I swear to you by the bones of my father and mother, by the memory of Jose Arcadio Buendia, I swear to you before God that I will drag you out from wherever you're hiding and kill you with my own two hands.' Before leaving the room, without waiting for any reply, she concluded: 'It's the same as if you'd been born with the tail of a pig'"

The repetition in this phrase emphasizes the harsh diction that the author is displaying here. The repetition of soft sounds is juxtaposing the harsh words being said, a syntactical device used by the author used to show the anger the mother is feeling towards her son. The last sentence also is a flashback to the earlier parts of the book, where his parents feared he would be born with a tail because he is an inbred child. This shows that all Ursula's worst fears about her son were childish compared to how he really turned out now.