I, the Supreme - Fin

I have to say, after my initial difficulties with the first half of I, the Supreme I found the second half of the book to be somewhat easier to read for some inexplicable reason – maybe I just became more familiar with the tone, style, and diction it was written in, or Roa Bastos just got lazy. Personally, I think the former is much more likely. That aside, I really came to love the style that the “novel” was written in (dictations to Patino and private journal entries by El Supremo) as it seemed to be the best way to accomplish Roa Bastos’s goal of getting as close as possible to El Supremo, even allowing his readers to seemingly slip inside the dark crevices of the man’s psyche. At many times the book had a surreal quality to it as though one was experiencing a sort of hallucination (i.e. El Supremo’s numerous conversations with his dead dog, Sultan), and at other times, it was almost unclear what exactly was happening, as though you were reading a diary of a madman even when an event was taking place, such as when El Supremo accidentally set fire to his study at the end of the book (by the way, was I the only one wondering how he was writing all of that down while the fire was raging?).

The moment that had the most impact on me was Patino taking dictation for his own death sentence from El Supremo (especially after he had just spent the last page or two praising El Supremo to the skies). That scene for me, was much like watching a horror movie. You know the one, where you’re almost yelling at one of the characters to stop doing something enormously stupid, like walking down into the basement with no weapons and without bothering to turn on the light, while all the while calling out “Is anybody there?” when they know perfectly well that there’s a serial killer on the loose whose been targeting his/her circle of friends and killing them one by one in various, gruesome ways. My immediate reaction was much like that, I felt like yelling at Patino to just stop taking the dictation. Just stop. Just put down the pen, turn around, and walk out the door. After though, when I thought back to this scene, I realised the significance of it. El Supremo’s control over everything was so absolute that Patino could not refuse; in fact, he acted like the idea of disobeying was nonexistent. However, the message was that El Supremo needed Patino in order to communicate his will. Without Patino, or without someone to take his dictation, he was just a sick, dying old man – not El Supremo.