One Hundred Years of Solitude: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Úrsula needs to put great effort into dying when the rain clears, as she had promised. She is embarrassed to discover that the children treated her like a plaything for years. She gets out of bed on her own to rejoin family life, and goes to work, restoring the quality of the house, as though nothing is wrong with her body. When she finds José Arcadio Segundo still locked up with Melquíades’ parchments, she insults him for living like a pig and he repeats one of her own sayings back to her: “What did you expect? Time passes.” She responds with Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s reply, “That’s how it goes, but not so much,” and realizes that time is moving in a circle.

José Arcadio (II) writes Fernanda that he plans to return to Macondo before taking his priestly vows. She commits to reviving the garden to impress her son on his return and tries to hasten her correspondence with the doctors. Úrsula orders that the house be opened to visitors again, but Fernanda insists the house remain closed. Aureliano Segundo goes around town selling raffle tickets for Petra Cotes, but he doesn’t realize that the people who buy them are often doing so out of pity for him. The drawing of the raffle tickets, though, becomes a weekly fair. The relationship between Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes changes, until they settle into a “paradise of shared solitude.”

Amaranta Úrsula is sent to a small private school and Aureliano is forbidden from attending public school, continuing his sequestration in the house. One afternoon Úrsula asks him who he is, and when he tells her his name, she mistakes him for her son, and tells him it’s time to begin to learn silver-smithing. Úrsula’s senility returns and the family cannot tell the difference between what she recounts as a current  feeling and what she is remembering. Her body shrivels up, causing her to look as much like a newborn as an old woman.   The children continue playing with Úrsula’s body, declaring her dead. Úrsula tries to protest, but realizes, to her surprise, that they are correct. She estimated her age to be between 115 and 122.

Birds run into walls and break through the screens to die in the bedrooms. The townspeople assume it’s a plague, but the 100-year-old Father Antonio Isabel claims that the birds are dying because of the influence of a half-billy goat, half-female heretic he refers to as the Wandering Jew. The people of the town assume he is rambling out of old age, as well, until a woman sees some hoof tracks, and the people of the town set traps for the creature, catching it and hanging it in the square for all to see.

Rebeca dies at the end of the year. Aureliano Segundo tries to fix up her house to sell it, but it proves beyond repair. With Úrsula’s death, the Buendía house also falls into disrepair. The invisible doctors examine Fernanda for hours, but find nothing wrong with her that matches her symptoms. The issue might be that Fernanda continues to use the wrong words for things. Aureliano Segundo promises to send Amaranta Úrsula to school in Brussels and Aureliano shows no interest in anything outside the front door. José Arcadio Segundo teaches Aureliano how to read and write, and shows him what he’s figured out in the parchments of Melquíades.

Aureliano Segundo feels a knot in his throat. He visits Pilar Ternera, now one hundred years old and running a brothel, for a remedy. She reads her cards and tells him that a tumor has formed in his throat because Fernanda has poorly performed black arts trying to get him to return home. She tells him a ritual to perform to counter the effects of the spell on him and he feels immediately better. Six months later though, he wakes up coughing and realizes the truth: he is dying. He tells no one, working as hard as he can to earn the money to send Amaranta Úrsula to school as he had promised. He organizes a raffle of the lands decimated by the rains and the celebration on the evening of the raffle rivals the biggest parties that came before.

Two months later Amaranta Úrsula goes to Brussels to stay at a boarding house run by a nun recommended by Father Ángel. Fernanda has packed her baggage, trying to get her to take along the golden chamber pot, but Amaranta Úrsula refuses it. Amaranta Úrsula, waving from the train car, will be the way Aureliano Segundo remembers her a few months later, at his hour of death. On the ninth of August, José Arcadio Segundo tells Aureliano to always remember that 3000 people died in the banana massacre and were thrown into the sea, before dying with his eyes open. At the same moment, Aureliano Segundo dies in his bed.

Petra Cotes visits the Buendía house to deliver the shoes that Aureliano Segundo asked to be buried in. She asks Fernanda if she might see the body, but Fernanda won’t permit it and refuses to take the shoes. Santa Sofia de la Piedad cuts the throat of José Arcadio Segundo to ensure that they are not burying him alive, his greatest fear. The twins are again as identical as the day they were born and the drunkards who carry their coffins out of the Buendía house accidentally bury the men in each other’s graves.