Upon awakening, he decides to establish Macondo at the riverside; after days of wandering the jungle, his founding of Macondo is utopic. For years the town is solitary and unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual visit of a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople technology such as magnets , telescopes , and ice. Ultimately he is driven insane, speaking only in Latin , and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years until his death.
Eventually Macondo becomes exposed to the outside world and the government of newly independent Colombia. He becomes an iconic revolutionary leader, fighting for many years and surviving multiple attempts on his life, but ultimately tires of war and signs a peace treaty with the Conservatives. Disillusioned, he returns to Macondo and spends the rest of his life making tiny gold fish in his workshop.
The railroad comes to Macondo, bringing in new technology and many foreign settlers. An American fruit company constructs a banana plantation outside the town and builds its own segregated village across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity that ends in tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking plantation workers, an incident based on the Banana Massacre of As he reads the manuscript, a wind destroys all traces of Macondo's existence.
The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history". The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create.
Yellow and gold are the most frequently used and symbolize imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction. It is the reason for Macondo's location, but also a symbol of its fate. Higgins writes, "By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history.
