Colonel Aureliano Buendia

Colonel Aureliano Buendia is a central figure of the Buendia family across Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, introduced in the novel's famous opening line as a man who, facing a firing squad many years later, would remember the distant afternoon his father took him to discover ice. He becomes a leader of Liberal revolutionary forces in Colombia's civil wars, launching thirty-two armed uprisings and surviving fourteen assassination attempts, before growing disillusioned with the wars' futility and withdrawing into the solitary, obsessive craft of making tiny gold fish, melting each one down only to begin the next. Aureliano's arc from idealistic revolutionary to isolated artisan embodies the novel's recurring themes of solitude, cyclical history and the doomed grandeur of the Buendia family line, and helped establish the character as one of the touchstones of Latin American magical realism. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/