2. Meme is so upset my Mauricio's paralysis that she is a mute. Fernanda takes her to the city where she is from, and then Meme joins the convent. Many months after this a nun from the convent brings a baby to the Buendia house, Fernanda pretends that the child is not Meme's and hides it in the workshop. Jose Arcadio Segundo has been organizing a strike for the banana plantation workers to protest the poor working conditions. The government invites them to a meeting "to resolve things", but it ends up being a trick and the government shoots them all and throws the bodies in a train that will go to the sea. Jose Arcadio has been mistaken for dead and manages to jump off the train and go back to Macondo, there he realizes that nobody remembers the massacre and they do not believe his story. The government is denying that this ever took place while they continue to search for leaders of the strike, including Jose Arcadio who they eventually find in Melquiades' old room. The room is so old and decrepit that that is all they pay attention to, they don't see Jose Arcadio who will continue to study the gypsy's manuscripts alone in that room having gone insane. The rain that starts on the night of the massacre does not stop for five years, Aureliano Segundo begins to take care of his children and Meme's. Aureliano Segundo's fortune is quickly wiping away as all of his livestock have died in the flooding, he makes it his mission to find the fortune that Ursula hid somewhere in the backyard. Fernanda makes it her mission to torture Aureliano Segundo and also to contact telepathic doctors to cure her of a disease. When the rain stops and the banana plantations are gone because of it, the town goes backwards in memory.
3. I find the number of biblical allusions in this novel to be very interesting. Most of the novel seems to mirror the occurrences that take place in the book of Genesis. First of all, Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendia are similar to Adam and Eve seeing as how they were responsible for giving names to many things, and Jose was tied to a tree which was supposed to represent The Tree of Knowledge. Because of this event, Jose and Ursula and their descendants were condemned to lives of solitude. Also, the flood that took place in this section was very significant in comparing One Hundred Years of Solitude to the happenings of the Bible. In the Bible, God flooded the Earth to show that the sins of humanity were already wiped away. It was sort of a cleansing, or purification, just as the flood that happened after the Banana Massacre cleansed the town of Macondo. In a way, it also wiped away the government's sin of trying to cover up what happened to the banana plantation workers.
4. a) Since the massacre is wiped from the memories of the people of Macondo, is Marquez trying to allude to the idea that it was actually erased out of our history too?
b) Are there other events, similar to the Banana Massacre that the government, or media has tried to cover up?
c) Who are these doctors that Fernanda is trying to contact? Are they even real?
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