One Hundred Years of Solitude: VI-X

It is interesting and sad how all of Ursula's sons ultimately become corrupted and loose their integrity. Ursula notices this herself when Colonel Aureliano Buendia becomes a recluse and comes home "only to change his clothes". "They're all alike...at first they behave very well, they're obedient and prompt and they don't seem capable of killing a fly, but as soon as their beards appear they to ruin." (156) Though this transformation is seen in all her sons I think the greatest loss is that of Jose Aureliano because he always seemed to me to be the son with the most sense and reserve. But war changes him into a man who is unrecognizable to those he used to love. Ursula feels that her son is an "impostor" and notes sadly that "he looks like a man capable of anything." (160) He indeed proves that he is capable of anything, even ordering his best friend to be shot because he dared disagree with him. Though he does not follow through with the murder, Colonel Gerineldo Marquez warns him, "watch out for your heart, Aureliano...You're rotting alive." I think this accurately describes what is happening to Aureliano. He has lost his soul. He has "ended up as bad as they are"(163) they being the enemy Conservatives. Ursula grows angry when she hears that he plans to kill Marquez, "It's the same as if you'd been born with the tail of a pig" she says. He has been reduced to something less than human.

I feel that the cause of this theme of corruption occurs when the characters reach puberty and become led more by their emotions and hormones than by logic or reason . After the death of his love Remedios, Aureliano does not fall in love again like so many other characters, but turns to only the physical pleasure of women, siring 17 sons all by different women but never settling down or loving again. "The countless women he had known on thee desert of love and who had spread his seed all along the coast had left no trace in his feelings. Most of them had come into his room in the dark and had left before dawn, and on the following day they were nothing but a touch of fatigue in his bodily memory." (178) Even his memory of Remedios begins to fade into a "hazy image of someone who might have been his daughter." (178)
This change with puberty may be why there are so many instances of characters "falling in love with" others who are so much younger and more "pure" than themselves.