**He was given an omen by Pilar Tenera..."Well," Aureliano said. "Tell me what it is." Pilar Tenera bit her lips with a sad smile. "That you'd be good in war," she said. "Where you put your eye, you put your bullet." p.76. The interesting part is his reply, "I will recognize him," he said. "He'll bear my name." The subject changes abruptly after this...This is an interesting sort of foreshadowing. It takes another sixty pages before we get any notion of what this means.
**Aureliano "man's up" to his father-in-law, and takes a stand for his views. This is the first time we get a glimpse of who he can be. He wants to do the right thing. p.96-101
**He organized 32 armed uprisings and lost them all, had 17 male children with 17 different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of 35. He survived 14 attempts on his lie, 73 ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse. Although he fought at the head of his men, the only wound that he received was self-inflicted. He died of old age.
Colonel Aureliano becomes what he hates. He has a certain power that he cannot contain. He thinks things, bad things, and his men act them out. He's not exactly the aggressor, but he is the catalyst for the ideas of aggression that his men have. I guess you could say that he has a great power of influence. I'm still pondering the meaning of Pilar's omen...
He does things, for the sheer act of doing them. He makes and sells his gold fish and uses the profits to make more gold fish. His life is very cyclical at this point. He does the same things each week, right down to shaving and getting his hair cut. He loves no one, truly.
The Colonel is now dead. It doesn't even seem like he saw it coming, as he had presupposed. The circus came to town one last time, he stepped out of his self-imposed solitude to catch a glimpse of it, and a vapor of the memory of ice that he had lost. Then he dies. It was so quick. It is Ursula who, through her decrepitude, is able to give us the most clear picture of the Colonel. He wept in her womb. He seems to have been cursed with pride. He fights not out of honor or duty, put out of the sheer rage of his pride. Ursula pity's him for this. It is his handicap.
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The Colonel is the most round character of this text for me. The changes that war and life bring to him is alarming. "He had not shaved, more tormented by the bain of the sores than by teh great failure of his dreams, for he had reached the end of all hope,beyond glory and the nostalgia of glory" (p. 176).
I hope I never get to this point. I teared up at this part.
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