Humn. 300

We as humans encounter numerous people on a daily basis who directly and/or indirectly affect us. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, we are introduced to strange and mysterious characters. These characters were inspired by Marquez’s interactions with people throughout his life as were the events that take place over the course of the story. Melquiades, who is not a member of the Buendia family, but the head gypsy of a caravan that travels through Macondo, impacts the Buendia family in such a way that their lives are scripts in his mind waiting to be written down and later decoded, in the same way that God affects our lives today. Melquiades first comes into contact with the Buendia family when he meets Jose Arcadio Buendia when the gypsy caravan travels to Macondo and they exchange goods. It is at these events that Jose Arcadio Buendia is introduced to technology from the outside world including an alchemy lab which Melquiades gives as a gift to Jose Arcadio Buendia. Melquiades is a magical man who brings a magic carpet to Macondo and who cures the town of its insomnia/amnesia plague with a magic potion. Over time, according to people who visited Macondo, “Melquiades’ tribe had been wiped off the face of the earth because they had gone beyond the limits of human knowledge” (Marquez 42-43). Later, Melquiades returns from the dead, which he does many times throughout the story, as a ghost, in the same way that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Melquiades the composes a series of manuscripts encoded in Spanish but translated into Sanskrit, that turns out to predict the entire history of the Buendia family. This may relate to the way we feel about our predetermined destiny, fate, or even God’s will. Melquiades will now act as a mentor or guide for the entire Buendia family until the end of the family line. Melquiades would appear to members of the family and they would recognize him at once because, “that hereditary memory had