SOURCE: Clark, John R. “‘The Biblical Hurricane’ in One Hundred Years of Solitude: Bang or Whimper?” Studies in Contemporary Satire 19 (1995): 118-23.

In the following essay, Clark provides a critical interpretation of the conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

—it shall pass, however, for wondrous Deep,                     upon no wiser a Reason than because                                                                       it is wondrous Dark— 

—Jonathan Swift

Concerning the catastrophic finale in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), these are the cues we are given: we read that Melquiades has left an obscure “prophecy” about the Buendia family. We are informed that three sets of Buendias have engaged in deliberate acts of incest, one couple most recently, and that two of these pairs of sinners have as a consequence produced deformed children—infants with a pig's tail, stigmatized with what José Arcadio euphemistically calls “animal features.”¹ Now we learn at the conclusion...