Foretold Literary Elements

This quote is significant to the present context because the characters in the story are all finally coming to the conclusion that time is cyclic. Although the basic plot of the story is linear—they married, they formed a village, the village advanced, the village was wiped out—within the linear timeline, events repeat themselves over and over with only minor changes. In the quote, Ursula is starting to truly come to terms with this. Jose Arcadio Segundo says that time is passing, meaning linear. Although Ursula agrees with him, "That's how it goes" (Marquez 335), when she notices that she replies with the same exact words that Aureliano used many years before, she is hit with the ironic realization that time is not in fact linear, but cyclic. This quote is also significant to the past because this instance was the not the first of Ursula's realizations about cyclic time. Earlier on in the story, in response to Jose Arcadio Segundo single-mindedly building a canal, Ursula says, "it's as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning" (Marquez 193). This shows that similar to how Ursula notices that time is cyclic; the act of her noticing is also very repetitive. She again reiterates the cyclic nature of events when Aureliano devotes himself to the construction of the railroad. Another reason why this quote is relevant to the past is because the realization of cyclic time makes it impossible for …show more content…
One such future event that can be predicted is other characters coming to the same realizations about time. Later in the story, Jose Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano come to the same conclusion about time: it could be "always March there and always Monday" (Marquez 348). Other events are also predictable with the realization that time is cyclic and events repeat themselves throughout the