One Hundred Years of Solitude is the subjective "story" of the founding family of the city of Macondo. During his early years, the city is isolated from the outside world, except for a few traveling gypsies who frequent the city, selling seemingly extraordinary new technologies such as ice, telescopes, and "scientific advances" and implanting ideas of alchemy in the patriarch's head. of the Buendía family, José Arcadio Buendía. A rather impulsive and curious man, he is also profoundly solitary, alienating himself from other men in his obsessive investigations into the science of alchemy, taking the last inheritance of his wife, Ursula, in an attempt to create gold by other, more common methods. . After José Arcadio Buendía's attempts at alchemy prove unsuccessful, he shifts his aspirations to finding a way back to civilization. He leads the city's founding men on a mission to retrace their previous path to Macondo, but ultimately declares that it is surrounded by water on all sides and impossible to regain contact with the rest of the world. These key character traits, played by the patriarch, are inherited by many of his descendants throughout the novel including his eldest son, José Arcadio, who inherits his immeasurable physical strength and impulsiveness. As a teenager, José Arcadio is seduced by the local fortune teller, Pilar Ternera, and later gets her pregnant. However, José Arcadio did not have the same fundamental value of family that his father felt, and even went as far as running away with the gypsies before his son was born. After his disappearance, a devastated Ursula set out in search of her son. He never found it, but he discovered the path to civilization, giving birth to a new era for... middle of paper... prophecies signal that time collapses in on itself, combining past, present and future into one time ambiguous in which nothing changes, but simply rotates. In a way, this happened throughout the book: the spirits of the past materialized and vanished, Pilar Ternera could read the future as well as the past, and Buendías' actions seem to merge the past, the present, and the future into only one. . The final moments of Aurelian II represent a miniature version of what has happened all along. Time, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is not a distinct linear movement of individual events, but rather a boundless quantity of movements all happening at the same time, in which no event can be considered unique because it connects to both the past and the past. the future. It's already happening, at the same time, somewhere else.