Decoding Macondo’s Mirrors in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: Metaphor for Multiple Personality

Why is Macondo a “city of mirrors”? What does that mean? The question is what mirrors meant to Garcia Marquez, not what they mean to you or me.

In his short story, “Dialogue with the Mirror” (discussed in my post of 19 May 2014) mirrors meant multiple personality. Did Garcia Marquez use the same metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude? Let’s see.

Dialogue with the Mirror

“…his twin brother, with his frothy brush, had begun to cover his chin with blue-white coolness, letting his left hand move — he imitated him with the right — with smoothness and precision…he raised his right arm (left arm) to the level of his right ear (left ear), making the observation along the way that nothing should turn out to be as difficult as shaving oneself the way the image in the mirror was doing…But the aesthete in him…overcame the mathematician…and the mathematician and the aesthete were at peace now…With precision and deftness — the mathematician and the artist showed their teeth — he brought the razor backward (forward) and forward (backward) up to the corner of this mouth to the right (left), while with his left hand (right hand) he smoothed his skin, facilitating in that way the passage of the metal edge, from front (back) to back (front), and up (up) and down, finishing — both panting — the simultaneous work…He…closed his eyes…while there in the mirror, a face just like his contemplated him…” (1).

One Hundred Years of Solitude

“That night, at dinner, the supposed Aureliano Segundo broke his bread with his right hand and drank his soup with his left. His twin brother, the supposed Jose Arcadio Segundo, broke his bread with his left hand and drank his soup with his right. So precise was their coordination that they did not look like two brothers sitting opposite each other but like a trick with mirrors” (2, p. 172).

Like the trick with a mirror in his short story, “Dialogue with the Mirror,” about multiple personality. Thus, ten years later, in his masterpiece novel, Garcia Marquez refers us back to his use of that metaphor in his short story.

In the novel, mirrors are associated with Macondo, a town, and its houses.  So it is worth keeping two things in mind. First, One Hundred Years of Solitude evolved from Garcia Marquez’s earlier attempt at a novel, which he had titled, “The House.” Second, a house—or, on a larger scale, an apartment building—is a common metaphor for multiple personality.

The house is a common metaphor for multiple personality, because it makes it easy to visualize the various individuals, or families, of tenants (alternate personalities) living in separate rooms or apartments. As in multiple personality, some of the tenants are aware of, and communicate with, each other. But some tenants are unaware of each other. And some may keep totally to themselves and live in solitude.

The novel’s reference to Macondo as “the city of mirrors” (2, p. 417) is found at the climax—in fact, in the very last sentence—when the often mentioned, secret documents have finally been fully translated and decoded. Indeed, the process of this final revelation is referred to as the documents' having become like “a speaking mirror” (2, p. 416).

The mirror metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude is used from the beginning. As early as page 24, we read that “Jose Arcadio Buendia did not succeed in deciphering the dream of houses with mirror walls until the day he discovered ice” (2). (But ice does not explain it and turns out to have been only a red herring.)

The mirror metaphor is continued on page 139 when Jose Arcadio Buendia dreams that he was going “from room to room, as in a gallery of parallel mirrors” (2). So the novel has the mirror metaphor for multiple personality from start to finish. But does the novel refer to multiple personality in any other way?

The novel’s other references to multiple personality include the following three: First, on pages 66-67 (2), Aureliano has a dissociative fugue, typical of multiple personality, in which he finds himself somewhere without being able to remember how he got there. Second, Colonel Aureliano Buendia is puzzled to find that orders are being carried out by his soldiers, orders supposedly given by him, but which he does not remember giving, so that “He felt scattered about, multiplied…” (2, p. 166). Third, in regard to the twins, Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo, it is found that when one of them is given a glass of lemonade, the other one knows whether it needs sugar (2, p. 182) (which would be easy to explain if they were really two alternate personalities in the same body).

In short, Macondo is Garcia Marquez’s mind, which is a house or city of mirrors (multiple personality).

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Collected Stories. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.