Regardless of method of control, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is writing for the reader to give him/her the most opportunity to create. As I’ve mentioned, there is little color, and what is offered is intense: white houses painted blue or red, finally colorless with layers of paint; and the yellow flowers:
"Then they went into Jose Arcadio Buendia’s room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by."
And that is the end of Jose Arcadio Buendia. An unnatural event follows one we think is natural, death. Are the flowers a veil of grief, or evidence of life after the fall of a man? A symbol of hope and rejuvenation? Or, surreal as the flying carpet, does Marquez test us to insure we are still capable of believing him after he has destroyed our hero? Maybe he, like me, wants to give this poor man a fitting tribute and words of natural reality are just not enough. Yellow is a sign of friendship. I wonder whether when he is going beyond the readily believable, Marquez provides the crayon to assist us in the image. But he goes no further than blue, red and yellow; the primary colors. We still need to blend them together.
Do the flowers symbolize hope, or the unreality of life, or the unreality of death? Do they mean nothing more than Are you still with me? or, Trust me, I loved him too.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology