43 pages • 1 hour read
Gabriel García Márquez, Transl. Gregory RabassaA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The narrator, returning to the body discovered in the palace, is still unsure whether it’s the body of the General. They clean the body, covered in marine waste and putrefied, and use paraffin and starch to repair the face. Leaders of political parties, ministers, and generals join to celebrate victory over despotism. There is no direction for the nation because the General never left anything in place for the time that he would die—including where he’d be buried.
In his final days, the General can remember very little of his life except flickers of the way the nation was before he ruled or memories of Leticia. She teaches him to read and write. Leticia she also changes the way he presents himself and the way he rules. Leticia pleads with the General that faith and the Church should be restored, and he restores them. Leticia learns to bend the General to her will, but he refuses to marry her at first. When they do wed, Leticia gives birth to their son at the altar before she can say her vows. The wedding is performed in secret so that the people wouldn’t know that the couple conceived a child out of wedlock. The baby is named Emanuel and appointed Major General before being immediately baptized at birth. Emanuel is decorated like an active general and participates in society and culture from an early age. Leticia begins to squander the government’s money and everything that she touches decays or rots. The more the people see of the General’s family, the less they see of him. Insurrectionists attempt to kill Leticia and her son and, disillusioned from his state of romance, the General’s paranoia returns. He tightens restrictions on her movement and guards. Despite these efforts, Leticia and Emanuel are torn to shreds by dogs in the public market.
The General seizes the dogs and hides everything that might remind him of his family. He chains the dogs up in the courtyard and forbids mourning or condolences. In anger, he searches for people who orchestrated this attack. His guards inform him that they’ve likely captured the culprits, two men with whom the dogs were familiar, who are being held in the dungeon. The General decides to have them quartered by horses and dragged through the streets. A stranger, José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, also referred to as Nacho, appears with his Doberman, Lord Kochel, and offers the General his services to find and kill the real assassins. The General agrees, and Nacho begins killing people in droves. With every kill, he sends the General their heads, until he’s beheaded more than 1,000 people without yet finding the killers. He takes control of the regime from under the General’s nose. On the eve of a celebration, the General does not join in and instead goes to his room, realizing it’s been 100 years since his mother died.
Though Part 4 conveys a decline into violent power by the General’s regime, the initial return to the General’s body in Part 5 conveys a vacuum of power in which there might be hope. This hope is cautionary, since the body is still not definitively the General’s, even if it’s being prepared as such. The narrator not only returns to the body but also returns to the aftermath of the General’s first death where “in the cabinet room meanwhile we called for the unity of all against the despotism of centuries so we could divide up the booty of his power in equal parts” (157). Márquez uses repetition to describe the aftermath of the General's first and second death. The first time, the General sprang back to life and murdered everyone who celebrated his passing. This time, however, no one knows what will become of them now that the General might be gone. The narrative ambiguity about the body hence creates a sense of underlying threat
Márquez develops Leticia’s character in this section and her character arc reflects the problems with The Pursuit of Power. She becomes excessive in her spending and despoils all that she touches, signifying her immediate corruption because of her proximity to, and eventual use of, the General’s power. In this sense, she is a foil for Manuela. Though she initially attempts to sway the General toward better outcomes for the nation based on her faith, like restoring missionary nuns and churches and teaching the General to read and write, eventually she comes to wield the dictatorial power toward her own ends, like providing asylum to her family and buying exorbitant amounts of unnecessary goods. This culminates in her corruption becoming so complete that she spoils everything she touches. When she shops at the market, this is evident:
the most delicious fruits and the tenderest vegetables would wither the instant she touched them, unaware of the evil virtue of her hands which made mold grow on bread that was still warm and had blackened the gold of her wedding ring. (171)
Márquez chooses natural resources—fruit, vegetables, bread, and gold—to compare Leticia’s decline with the economic decline of the nation which exports its goods in exchange for trinkets. Both her own internal turn toward avarice and her rejection of her previous life as a nun result in her outward corruption which, in turn, ruins everything her money can buy and which would make profit for the people in her nation.
Leticia does manage to restore elements of entertainment which bring joy to not only the people, but to the General himself. The intimacy that this builds creates a bond between the ruler and ruled which solidifies his seemingly eternal rule. During a poetry festival that Leticia convinced the General to restore, the narrator reflects that “we felt the invisible presence that watched over our destiny so that it would not be altered by the disorder of poetry” (181). In this passage, Márquez employs metafiction by referring to a governmental “presence” in “poetry” to suggest the threat of totalitarian regimes to the reading of literature—something in which the reader is engaging. The relationship of the people to their despotic ruler, and his ability to perpetuate his power even if he remains unseen, becomes the crux of the final section of the novel and the eventual dissolution of the General’s rule which carries on without him while he dies alone in his palace.
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