My students struggle with Hundred Years of Solitude. I would skip it for their sakes, but it’s hard to teach any sort of Latin American literature survey course without at least touching upon the single most influential, popular, and celebrated novel that Latin America has ever produced. I’ve tried only teaching select chapters and passages from the novel–to take a greatest hits approach to Gabriel García Márquez, so to speak–but my students then (justifiably) complain that they are missing a bunch of important context to the story, rendering them more confused than ever. I then have to explain to them (as one who has wrestled with this novel many times myself), that reading all the intervening chapters we skipped will not render the text any more intelligible or easier to follow.

The primary difficulty with Hundred Years of Solitude is that something new and wild is happening in almost every single sentence of the novel, without break or reprieve, in a never-ending series of narrative whiplashes: a paramour dies by suicide due to unrequited love, and it’s only treated as a brief aside; Remedios the Beauty suddenly ascends into heaven without warning and without tasting of death, and it’s given equal weight to another character complaining that Remedios ascended without returning her best bedsheet; a U.S.-based banana company massacres a crowd of striking workers with machine-guns, and everyone in the town promptly forgets all about it (similar to how we’re actively forgetting about the pandemic, incidentally); and so on and so forth. Although the text does at least stick to following the genealogy of only one single family in the fictional Columbian town of Macondo, there is nevertheless no clear main character throughout for the reader to latch onto.

In some ways, it’s like reading an extended Grimm’s Brothers Fairy Tale in the original, wherein one can never anticipate just what wild twist the next paragraph or line will bring, or even who the protagonist will turn out to be. I have argued to my students that this fairy tale approach to story-telling is ironically more true to life: by contrast, our crime-dramas and romantic-comedies and action-films all follow clear, logical structures, with clearly-identified protagonists and antagonists and obvious foreshadowing and pay-offs; we tend to call this style of story-telling “realism.” But actual real life behaves much more like a fairy tale, wherein from day to day, hour to hour, we are never certain of just what’s going on or what will happen next. Whoops, here’s a global pandemic out of nowhere shutting everything down! And now Russia’s invading Ukraine! And some billionaires got imploded in a Titanic sub! There is no consistent logic to reality, no over-arching narrative, no comforting formula, no climax, no pay-off, only a never-ending series of disparate events. If Hundred Years of Solitude is confusing, I argue, it’s confusing in the exact same way that real life itself is confusing.

Naturally, some students then protest that the whole reason they consume fiction is to get a reprieve from the depressing, nonstop insanity of reality. The whole point of crime-dramas and romantic-comedies and action-flicks and what-have-you is that they are soothingly predictable, escapist, and structured in a way that real life never is. A novel that reflects reality is redundant, they argue; we already have reality. What then (other than the sheer intellectual challenge of “solving” a difficult text) is the point of a novel like Hundred Years, they ask?

For now anyways, my response has been: novels like these are a useful corrective to Main Character Syndrome. Anyone who has ever worked in retail or food service already knows what I’m talking about: those certain people who behave as though they are the main character of reality, and that the world should conform to their own desires, wants, needs, and convenience, and become enraged whenever it is not. These were the people for example who refused to mask up or socially distance during the pandemic, because the very idea that they should inconvenience themselves even slightly to help others was literally incomprehensible to them. These are also the rich men doing mass-layoffs even at profitable companies, because they do not actually perceive the human beings working under them as real people. CEOs, mass-shooters, conspiracy-theorists, narcissists, sociopaths, vigilantes, presidents, terrorists, fascists, tyrants, dictators–every last one of these are suffering from Main Character syndrome, and inevitably cause the rest of us to suffer with them.

Yet as David Foster Wallace might note, it’s not that most of these narcissists consciously choose to see themselves as the protagonist of reality (though a distressing number of them clearly do), but that such is, for most of us, our default mode—what happens when we are not thinking at all.

That is, Main Character Syndrome is the Natural Man.

And as another old American once said, the natural man is an enemy to God–precisely because the natural man is also an enemy to our fellow being, and to ourselves. If “when ye are in the service of your fellow being, ye are only in the service of your God,” then by corollary, when you are in not serving others, you are by definition refusing to serve God, and are in open rebellion against Him. As a corrective, King Benjamin’s people had to view themselves as “even less than the dust of the earth”–that is, they had to cease to view themselves as the Main Character of reality. Benjamin had to emphasize that he was no better than them either, lest they then treat him as the Main Character instead (as dictators tend to demand). This humility is what then allowed the people of Mosiah to see everyone else around them as people, as fellow children of God, with lives just as complex and vibrant as their own, and just as worthy of love and compassion.

This was, incidentally, Kierkegaard’s primary thesis in his most famous text Fear and Trembling; Hugh B. Brown had said “Abraham had to learn something about Abraham”, and per the Danish father of Existentialism, the thing Abraham had to learn was that he was not the protagonist of reality. Even if he was by all accounts far more charitable, righteous, generous, and humane than most the narcissists who try to rule the world, still Abraham suffered a bit from Main Character Syndrome himself. This, per Kierkegaard, is why God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac: so that he would stop seeing himself as the center of history, the center of the cosmos, as the main character.

The further irony there, of course, is that Abraham is (per the D&C) one of the Gods now, and all of us are adopted into his family. He is likewise considered the founding father of every major monotheistic faith. (There is also the irony that Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel intent on parodying and deconstructing Main Character Syndrome at every turn, is one of the most celebrated novels in any language of the past 100 hundred years). It’s the endless paradox of how only the humble will be exalted, only the last shall be first, only the weak shall be made strong–precisely because only those who honestly and sincerely don’t perceive themselves as the protagonist of reality deserve to be treated as such–because only the humble treat everyone else as the protagonist of reality as well. To learn to do so, in fact, may be the entire purpose of our mortal probation.

And it is a test that so many of us fail—indeed, per Mormon, “all things must fail.” And it is here with recalling that the final image of Hundred Years of Solitude is the final scion of the Arcadio Buendia family reading a book that had been first delivered to his forefathers by some traveling gypsies, back when Macondo was new and Edenic; it was a book his family was told would only be decipherable when Macondo was destroyed. And indeed, as the mysterious book suddenly becomes decipherable, an apocalyptic storm tears the town apart—which the final character reads about as he also reads himself reading the book in its final pages. He has discovered himself to actually be the main-character of reality, and it is only ashes and despair in his mouth—as it is with all others who suffer from Main Character syndrome and refuse to repent.