Haven’t read too much further, as the Buendias are about to enter a new era, but have been concentrating on the somewhat magical room of Melquiades that seems to be viewed in two different ways, and by Jose Arcadio Segundo’s run-in with the law, and his escape into pure solitude.
There are some pretty heavy duty metaphors here ( I think, for all I know, Marquez is simply telling a tale and has not considered them at all!), and the first one I’ll start with here is the train ride:
"When Jose Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying face up in the darkness. He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached. He felt an intolerable desire to sleep. Prepared to sleep for many hours, safe from the terror and the horror, he made himself comfortable on the side that pained him less, and only then did he discover that he was lying against dead people. There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle.
"(…)Trying to flee from the nightmare, Jose Arcadio Segundo dragged himself from one car to another in the direction in which the train was heading, and in the flashes of light that broke through the wooden slats as they went through sleeping towns he saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be throuwn into the sea like rejected bananas.
"(…) When he got to the first car he jumped into the darkness and lay beside the tracks until the train had passed. it was the longest one he had ever seen, with almost two hundred freight cars and a locomotive at either end and a third one in the middle." (p. three hundred twenty-nine)
This brings to my mind the endless rooms of Jose Arcadio Buendia. Is the chain of railroad cars Jose Segundo’s life journey? His great grandfather, in his final dream, had returned to the middle room, believing himself to be back at the beginning. Jose Segundo walks through the cars full of the dead to the front car, heading with the train’s movement away from Macondo. Therefore, going further than he would have gone had he gone backwards, or jumped from where he was somewhere along the line. I see this as intention to understand his beginning, to go through it again, just as his grandfather usually returned to the first room he entered in his dreams.
Or, as I say, it could mean nothing deeper at all. But there is meaning in the room of Melquiades. I shall get to that later.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology