100 Years of Yellow

100 Years of Yellow Color is omnipresent; we are educated about color, see it and use it every single day, and identify countless objects with it. Colors are prominent characteristics of our surroundings that may periodically go unnoticed, but are exceptionally significant in our everyday lives. The colors of streetlights and street signs are crucial to maintaining order, we are drawn to different things because of their colors, and artists produce masterpieces with combinations of colors. Gabriel García Márquez uses numerous colors to illustrate major themes in his magnificent novel, 100 Years of Solitude. When delving deeper into the story, the use of one color, in particular, evolves from being quite mundane to being rather meaningful, and that is the brilliant color yellow. A detailed interpretation and analysis of yellow color symbolism in Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude provides a better understanding of the colorful picture being painted. Márquez first introduces the color yellow to his story as a symbol for hubris and delusion through his main character, José Arcadio Buendía, the founder of Macondo. José Arcadio Buendía has an “unbridled imagination” that runs wild with “the urge to discover the wonders of the world” (Márquez 2; 9). He becomes obsessed with the possibilities of alchemy and in an attempt to double his wife’s gold, her “precious inheritance [is] reduced to a…pestilential syrup,” a dark yellow color “more like common caramel than of valuable gold” (Márquez 7). Another specific instance of this symbolism occurs when the foreign man, “attracted by the magical fascination of Remedios the Beauty,” approaches her after mass “with a yellow rose in his hand” (Márquez 195). This poor gentleman’s fruitless pursuit causes him to lose his grasp on reality and become a demoralized drunkard, caught up in the “sloughs of abjection and misery” until the train cuts him to pieces on the tracks (Márquez 195). This notion of being in over