. leftists like its dealing with social struggles and its portraits of imperialism; conservatives are heartened by the corruption and/or failure of those struggles and with the sustaining role of the family; nihilists and quietists find their pessimism reconfirmed; and the apolitical hedonists find solace in all the sex and swashbuckling (Bell-Villada 93)
However, while he is intelligent, he does not have the tools to achieve this and his mission does not succeed. In response, he gives up completely and states, "We'll rot our lives away here without the benefits of science" (Garcia Marquez 19)
The story of the Buendia family is obviously a metaphor for the history of the continent since Independence, that is, for the neocolonial period. More than that, though, it is also, I believe, a narrative about the myths of Latin American history (Martin 97)
It becomes a story about all societies and all people, how we define our own fates, and what we have to do to break free of those fates and create a new positive future. One source notes that "the quest for memory is the search for one's history" (Nora 289)
. I discovered that what I had to do [as a teller of tales] was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face (Bloom 231)