Summary “Autumn of the Patriarch” Marquez


The patriarch is the central character of the novel, representing a generalized image of the Latin American dictator. Deprived of specific features, the maximally generalized image of P. turns out to be the embodiment of the very idea of ​​power, its magical effect on human consciousness. The real characteristics of the president are reduced to a minimum: he was born, apparently, in the first half of the XIX century. his mother, poor poultry, his name is Bendix Alvarado, his name is Sa-karias (which is not entirely certain), the English sailors made him president, the date of his death is not known.

The story of P. is made up of many legends, stories, gossips, a pobasenok about various events, allegedly or really occurred in his life. About P. nothing is known for certain, for any information about him immediately evokes opposite memories in the narrator’s memory, and, thus, every episode from the life of the dictator (the story of his double and fictitious death, about

unrequited love for carnival star Manuel Sanchez, about the legitimate wife of P. Leticia Nazareno and her son, torn by dogs, about the mother of President Bendix Alvarado, her death and canonization, etc.) acquires some kind of ambivalence, whether it is truth, fiction, or historical fact, or a legend. Gradually, the figure of P. more and more mythologized, losing specific outlines – physiological, spatial, temporal – and gaining the status of the eternal and unshakable.

Roman Marquez tells us the myth of the ruler, but the myth is not a given, but as a living process of mythmaking. The novel “The Autumn of the Patriarch” is a narration about the creation of a myth, about the inherent ability of the people to shape the myth into everything that is inaccessible to rational comprehension and analysis. “We”, talking about the dictator, is a whole consisting of different voices, views, options for interpreting an event, exaggerations, distortions, fantasies. It is this “we” that makes the figure of the president such as it appears from the pages of the novel, turning

a certain person into a mythical patriarch. In the novel, Marquez shows the whole mechanism of the process of creating a myth: before the reader is first a series of isolated events, fragmentary information that gradually begins to take shape in the picture of the world,

As well as it is necessary to the mythological hero, it easily overcomes a border of a life and death which become for it identical conditions for it always whether has died, whether is live; his involvement in the two worlds is emphasized by the constantly changing (in the narrator’s perception) appearance of P. he seems to be a refined knight, an animal monster with huge elephant legs and feet with hawk claws, a ridge and unblinking iguanas eyes; he is the cause of everything that happens in the world (for example, a training shot from a heavy howitzer was perceived by the people as “the cause of a terrible cataclysm, for after the shot a terrible storm began”)


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Summary “Autumn of the Patriarch” Marquez