In memory of Aureliano's ice.

• Main Author: Ho, Jia Xuan.
• Other Authors: Daniel Keith Jernigan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/46363
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

For a man with seventeen sons, thirty odd wars under his belt and a relatively dysfunctional family, the fact that Colonel Aureliano Buendía figures his experience with ice as the defining moment in his life is intriguing to say the least. Going through the chain of events leading to the fateful encounter, he does not remember the acrobats with gold-capped teeth or the jugglers with six arms, nor the thousand more inventions so ingenious and unusual that his father wanted to invent a memory machine so that he could remember them all; in the critical moments right before his death, the other events are fleeting, yet “for the first time since his youth he knowingly fell into a trap of nostalgia and relived that prodigious afternoon of the gypsies when his father took him to see ice” (García Márquez 266-267). This brings us back to the very opening of Gabriel García Márquez‟s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the famous opening line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” (1). These repeated images suggest hints of conflicting emotions, a thin line between sentimentalism and obsession, yet undeniably, there seems to be more meaning attached to this piece of memory than what is actually revealed. Possibly, José Arcadio Buendía‟s assessment of ice as “the great invention of our time” may have made a permanent imprint on Aureliano‟s memory, yet one cannot underestimate the “boiling” impact of his personal experience (18). But one thing is certain: judging by the description of ice, “an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars”, Aureliano‟s encounter is not as simple as it initially appears to be (17).