'One Hundred Years Of Solitude': Teacher Asks Students To Turn García Marquez Novel Into Memes

Jacqueline Bustamante, a Language and Communications professor in Santiago, Chile, knows we are living in different, digital and speedy times, and therefore decided to ask her students for a very different assignment so they would read Gabriel García Marquez’s 1967 classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The girls had to reinterpret the novel into internet memes.

“I hope this helps other profesors abandon rigid and boring teaching schemes in future,” Bustamante said.

Not only did her students deliver with smart and funny interpretations of the novel's characters such as Ursula, Amaranta and Pilar Ternera, Aureliano Buendía, and the rest of the incestuous family, José Arcadio and more, but the memes illustrating Gabo’s novel actually went viral. “I had to come up with something different because students these days don’t want to read anymore,” Bustamante explained. “I had warned my students it was going to be a very different evaluation, and they laughed a lot when we put them up in the school hallways.”

In fact, Bustamante was so proud of her girls that she posted the memes on her Facebook profile to show them off. Days later, the news about what she (and her students) had achieved were all over the world!

Here are some of the students’ fantastic interpretations.

The classic novel, which earned García Marquez a Nobel Prize in 1982, tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, a metaphoric Colombia that becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events involving the family.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is considered the author's ultimate masterpiece. The book is García Marquez’s best selling and most translated work, but unlike his other books, it has not been adapted into film. This is because he never agreed to sell the rights to produce a movie adaptation.