Outside Reading - Week 2, Post A

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One cultural difference I noticed was the belief in myths and old wives's tales. In this passage, Ursula's great-great-grandmother believed that pirates would come to attack her, haunted by an experience she had as a child. She became frightened by the ringing of alarms and bells which resulted in her freaking out and igniting herself on the kitchen stove. For the rest of her life, she would be consumed with the irrational fears of random pirate attack, "Finally he sold the business and took the family to live far from the sea in a settlement of peaceful Indians located in the foothills, where he built his wife a bedroom without windows so that the pirates of her dream would have no way to get in" (19).