The General in His Labyrinth - Part I

The General in His Labyrinth turned out to be quite a nice read, so to speak, coming directly out of a book like I, the Supreme. It has characters! It has chapters (sort of)! It’s only a little more than 250 pages! García Márquez is very talented in drawing out the very tail end of the life of Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator, with every page and paragraph meticulously sculpted by the author to create a poignant image of the General as he goes on his final journey. Right from the first page and continuing on into every page, is a carefully created dichotomy and contrast of the General’s person. He is simultaneously weak and strong at the same time. While he suffers terribly from tuberculosis (I felt compelled to look it up because I was becoming very frustrated with the General’s refusal of doctors, and because I just really wanted to get a more precise image in my head of what was really going on with him. Oh, and I looked it up on Wikipedia no less, so I know it must be right!) and bears all of the disease’s symptoms: fever, coughing, chills, night sweats, loss of appetite, etc… Yet, he is mentally alert, his will is tremendously strong, and he does all that is in his power to retain every last scrap of his dignity.

In the last three novels that we have read in class, all of the dictators we have encountered have turned out to be very much the same, and the authors have all done very good jobs of making me despise them. So, I was understandably surprised when I found myself actually liking, and even at times admiring, the General. García Márquez has made a larger than life figure like Simon Bolivar into a very tangible, very human character. He has his faults: he gets angry, he shouts, he throws a temper tantrum when he loses a card game. And he has his strengths: he’s an excellent tactician and a seemingly loyal friend who inspires such loyalty in others around him, and he’s very persevering when it comes to accomplishing any kind of goal, which is probably what allowed him to achieve so much in what seems like such a short amount of time. Overall, I’m finding that he’s a much more enjoyable “dicator” to hang around than El Supremo was. And on that note as well, he seems to throw into question what exactly defines a dictator.