One Hundred Years of Solitude

Throughout the book, omens and signs dictate characters’ behaviors. These omens represent fate. Thematically, the omens in the text concern whether any one character truly has free will and the ability to make decisions that do not have known outcomes. Omens, especially regarding travel, violence, and death, guide behavior and choices. Overall, characters appear to view the results of omens as inevitable. When the insomnia plague strikes the town of Macondo in Chapter 3, many citizens forget the names of objects and events from the past. Pilar helps combat the plague not by predicting the future but by predicting how individuals reacted to the past. She "conceived the trick of reading the past in cards as she had read the future before" (47). Using the tarot cards to foretell the future changes the way that the people behave, raising the question of whether suggestions about the future become self-fulfilling once they are known, or whether fate exists regardless of individuals’ prior knowledge of it.

Pilar foresees slivers of the future through direct omens and also through the reading of tarot cards. Though several members of the Buendía family come directly to her with their questions, she sometimes intuits outcomes without being asked. Her personal history is threaded through the history of the Buendía family. She is so close to them that she can predict life events or characteristics without needing the aid of the cards. She is a female seer, a character parallel to Melquíades. Each seer affects the fate of the Buendía family in different ways.

With her omens, Pilar spontaneously foreshadows what might happen to specific characters. When Amaranta receives an omen of death from a woman in a blue dress who resembles Pilar (278), the inevitability of her own imminent demise calms her. Instead of feeling panic, she prepares for the rites of death. The omen gives her comfort and strength as she weaves her own shroud, settles her affairs, and has herself measured for a coffin. She also chooses a specific outfit to wear at the time of her death. Instead of fighting the omen or disbelieving it, she takes it as truth and acts accordingly.

The narrative structure of the book overall is based thematically on the writing of Melquíades. Although his omens and prophecies about family events are revealed only in the final chapter, he wrote down everything that would happen to the Buendía family long before it occurred. His encoded writings suggest that one does not have to know about one’s fate beforehand for it to come to pass. Unlike Pilar, who directly tells characters their fate, Melquíades makes his predictions almost impossible to uncover. The writings act more as a confirmation of preordained events than as prophecies foretelling the future.