Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Basic set-up:

This is the very beginning of Márquez's novel.

These first few sentences of the novel set up time as a central theme of the novel. The book starts with the words "Many years later." Immediately, our attention is being called to time. Many years later from what? we might ask. When exactly was that "distant afternoon" when Colonel Aureliano Buendía discovered ice? If it was at a time when "many things lacked names," it must have been a very, very long time ago—but if that's the case, then hundreds of years would have to pass before firing squads could become a thing.

Márquez is playing with time in really interesting ways in this passage. For one thing, we can't really be sure when these events are taking place. On the one hand, there are things in this passage that point to a time we're all familiar with: there's a firing squad, there's a colonel, there are adobe houses.

On the other hand, Márquez is also taking us back to the very beginning of time. The village is "built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs."

We also find out that "[t]he world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." Okay, so it's like we're back at the very beginning of the world, when even language was new. What's up with the firing squads, then?

Márquez is basically destabilizing our sense of time. We're in the present, but we're also in the distant past. We're in a familiar time that's also very unfamiliar. Is time an illusion? How much of the past and the future seeps into the present? Why do we think time is linear, anyway?