Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Page 320 – 422 begins: “It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days.”
Conclusions/books as a whole

Macondo experiences a spell of inclement weather. When the rain finally clears, Ursula dies, Rebeca dies, José Arcadio Segundo dies and Aureliano Segundo dies (leaving Petra Cotes stuck with his boots). Finding the house too quiet for her liking, Santa Sofia de la Piedad packs her bags and hits the road. Aureliano takes on the care and feeding of Fernanda and the eventual preservation of her corpse until the not-quite-a-pope José Arcadia returns. Amaranta Úrsula returns from Brussels with a Belgian on a string, but eventually finds herself in bed with Aureliano. As the parchments foretold, the final Aureliano arrives with pig tail intact, though he is not long for this world. In the end, Macondo is gone with the wind…

On the surface,the continuous raining for "four years,eleven months,and two days" could be taken as one of the extreme usage of magical realism in One Hundred... But pay closer attention & you'll realize that Nature is mourning the horrendous massacre that the Macondoites have so conveniently forgotten.
It's unnatural for Nature to act this way but then things are no longer natural in Macondo! Such sins & corruption have taken place that natural order itself has collapsed. Cf. the unnatural happenings as witnessed after King Duncan's murder in Macbeth & also the famous line from Hamlet " Something is rotten in the state of Denmark".
The rain could also be seen as extreme irony that even the Nature in Colombia is being ruled by the banana plantation colonialists,as Mr. Brown said that any compensation would take place only after the rain stopped & the rain doesn't stop so no hope of any compensation!
Also once the "rain began to abate...it did not rain again for ten years*"!
What hope is left there for Macondo then? On page 336 itself the book's ending is revealed–" The wooden houses...seemed to have been blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth."
Márquez here was only following the method of the Greek tragedies of prophesying & premonitions. Infact,one very significant reason for the so called spoilers in the book is right there in the parchment of Melquíades:"...had not put events in the order of man's conventional time,but concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant." Márquez's text/narrative only mimics the method of Melaquíades' parchment– some stroke of genius that!

* A related post in the resource section.

The macro degeneration of Macondo is reflected in the microcosmic decay of the Buendia family–blind Ursula's desperate attempts to fight off the relentless onslaught of time's ruins:" A person can't live in neglect like this...if we go on like this we'll be devoured by animals."
This section gives us some beautiful writing on mature & compassionate love between Aureliano Segundo & Petra Cotes,P.344-45, also Fernanda's constant ranting at her husband was a class act– hard times had stripped away her veneer of sophistication & showed her for what she actually was– a petty-minded,shallow woman.

In the light of what happened to José Arcadio,do you think Ursula's stubborn decision not to reveal the location of the hidden money even when her family was in dire need of it,was a wise/right one?
What do you think of the meta nature of the ending– Aureliano reading about his end as the end itself is happening,also the very very clever insert of the writer's own persona in Gabriel Márquez who was the last person to leave Macondo in time "for Paris with two changes of clothing,a pair of shoes,and the complete works of Rabelais"? What do you think was the significance of that?

This book has gone to my all-time fav shelf. It has won itself a special place in my heart– I'm late with my posts cause I deliberately chose to forget this book for a while otherwise I was not able to read anything else! I LOVE this book.