Tuesday, December 2, 2008
I don’t know if you have read this far, we probably haven’t gotten here yet but I will blog about it regardless and you respond in a couple days. My thought is about cards. Cards come up in the book a lot. First we see them with Pilar Ternera. She uses cards to see the futures of characters. The cards hold the future of the characters so to speak. They cannot deny the cards or go against them. When Aureliano Segundo and Arcadio Segundo were born they were interchangeable. Ursula was convinced that they got mixed up in their childhood like a deck of cards being shuffled. The traits of these characters were decided by a deck of cards. The entire concept makes it seem like lives are all predestined according to how the deck is dealt. Hmmmm….. Interesting.
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4 comments:
You could expand this to think about the nature of randomness and contingency. Cards, lotteries, alphabetical order and many other things in this novel point to an undermining of logical, causal relationships. Unreason, disorientiation, timelessness seem to hold sway over the the orderly world of human civilization (the logocentric world). Cards are just one more symbol that is used to convey that.
Also, on a completely different note. In the chapter the we read for today there is a moment in which García Márquez refers to a game that José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo were playing. They were looking at one another and mirroring eachother´s movements...just like two jacks, kings or queens on a face card.
Yeah Corey...I think your thought is an interesting one...but...I have to disagree with your point about the twins being interchangeable. Although they may be interchangeable in appearance (i.e. the woman they were having an affair with didn't know that there were two of them), but their personalities are completely different. That would be like going up to a set of identical twins and asking them if they both like the same things because they look like the same things. I feel that Jose Arcadio Segundo has very similar traits to his grandfather, Jose Arcadio. They both leave Macondo in fear. Colonel Aureliano Buendia and Aureliano Segundo are similar too. They both stay in Macondo with the person they love and becomes successful. Therefore saying that the twins are interchangeable is in a way saying that Jose Arcadio and Colonel Aureliano Buendia are interchangeable, which simply is not true, they are quite opposite in fact.
The same but different...hmmm? Lyndon brings up something interesting though. These two are a lot like their namesakes, but what is different about them? For example, how is José Arcadio different from José Arcadio Segundo? How is Colonel Aureliano Buendía different from Aureliano Segundo? I think that there is a certain degeneration going on in the Buendía line.
Ummm, going back to before lyndon and to what mr. cummings said about randomness.
We have looked at randomness a lot and thought it was preposterous that an election could be decided by a lottery and not an election.
In this book it is the random that actually does affect everything, it has the most affect like someones names or what cards say and stuff.
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