43 pages • 1-hour read
The Autumn of the Patriarch
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Part 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6 Summary
At the viewing of the body, the people promote the General to General of the Universe. The narrator sees that while the body, with make-up and dress, looks more like the General now, he still looks very little like he might have looked while alive. The narrator reflects on the palace in ruin and on the fact that the nation is finally without its ruler. The people fear what might become of them after living so long under his control with his command dictating everything they’ve known.
A young girl narrates her rape by the General and her confusion because he became the greatest love that she’s ever known. The General, too, seeks sex from every schoolgirl that he meets as his debts pile up and foreign ambassadors come seeking the sea in repayment. The General refuses, saying that he’d “rather be dead than without a sea” (211). He spends his days locked in his palace chasing young schoolgirls, one of whom reveals to him that the girls passing by the palace every day are there only for him—trained not in scholastic education but rather in how to please him. Behind his back, the minister of education and archbishop primate construct this ruse to protect real schoolgirls from the General.
The General hardly recognizes the people he rules or what’s happening around him. This leaves room for José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra to set up torture arenas in an old asylum set up by the Dutch and in an old colonial masonry building. He feeds the bodies of the people that he beheads to Lord Kochel. The two are inseparable and always killing. The General feigns ignorance of this activity and begins to question why no one has tried to revolt against Nacho and his torturous methods. Nacho tells him not to worry. The General is left with nothing—no one to rule or fight against—and feels unimaginably alone in his rule. He begins to see a double appearing on his behalf in the news and public appearances. When he questions Nacho about this, Nacho tells him that all the dialogue is from recordings that they’ve taken during meetings and so the General’s rule is still his alone. The General continues to bend to Nacho’s justifications.
Eventually, people revolt, and the General sees this as a way out from the grips of José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, who ends up beaten and tied to a lamppost. The torture chambers which he built are shut down and de la Barra’s rule ends while the people exhort the General. The General begins to see all that he’s been unaware of, including the decay of his nation and the great debts that he cannot repay. To resolve both, the General sells the sea without protest from the people. In return, he’s left with a wind machine. The nation continues without him as the General fades away in the palace, reflecting on the early days of his regime when he took power while his mother was still alive. When they moved into the palace, nothing remained—everything was squandered by previous rulers. A person with leprosy remembers that the General healed him. However, even after all this time, his rule still ends in confusion, with no real power in his palace after all. The narrator reflects on seeing the General near the end with dementia. On the night of his death, he wanders around the palace remembering his mother, his rule, his beloved wife, and the many years of his regime until he dies alone, as he was always fated to do.
Part 6 Analysis
The culmination of the novel ends in vast bloodshed on behalf of José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra and the dissolution of the General’s regime. The General’s slow, solitary decay begins during Nacho’s reign of terror. Public appearances and speeches are forged by Nacho and any decisions that the General makes are first vetted or presented to him to present the illusion of his control. The general is eventually “free at last of his absolute power at the end of so many years of reciprocal captivity in which it was difficult to distinguish who was the victim of whom” (213). The ending places the General’s characterization in an ambiguous place as Márquez portrays him as a sympathetic figure. Though Nacho is eventually killed in a mutiny, the systems of power that he implemented before his death continue to perpetuate the perceived rule of the General even while he ages in the palace.
Part 6 is unique in exploring the General in a positive light, something that Márquez does to portray the totality of corruption. This reach of the General’s power infects the people of the nation, too. The narrator becomes first a child whom the General rapes and then someone with leprosy whom the General cures. In both instances, neither holds the General accountable for his actions and, instead, esteem him for his miraculous touch and tender care. When the unnamed narrator, or a voice for the people of the nation, realizes that the General might be dead, the narrator says, “we didn’t believe it now because we no longer wanted it to be true, we had ended up not understanding what would become of us without him” (207). The inclusion of these positive accounts at the end of the novel conveys the decline of the entire nation because of the totalitarian regime, convinced that the General is their God and their guide. Márquez hence suggests the infectious quality of such power and the way it contorts reality beyond recognition for everyone who must bear its weight.
Márquez portrays the illusion of power in the General’s final “decision” to sell the sea. This “choice” is the inevitable conclusion of a power that was originally orchestrated and upheld by colonial rule and foreign intervention. At one point, while the General narrates, he justifies the selling of the sea by saying:
It’s better to be left without the sea than to allow the landing of marines, remember that they were the ones who thought up the orders they made me sign […] they brought the Bible and syphilis, they made people believe that life was easy, mother, that everything is gotten with money […] that the nation is a business and that the sense of honor is a bother invented by the government so that soldiers would fight for free (233).
These consequences are presented as direct results of colonialism. This suggests that The Pursuit of Power in the novel is illusory; the General’s power is always connected to colonial power.
In the end, however, the people aren’t entirely corrupt in the same way that the General had to be, because they always understood The Inevitability of Death. The General, forever pursuing power over love or life or happiness, dies alone with nothing because, as the people narrate at the end of the novel, “we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death” (255). Ultimately, every effort that the General made to avoid his fate—that fate all people who live are subjected to—was an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, Márquez ends the novel with a flicker of hope because, even though the people fear what they might become without him, the opportunity for them to return to themselves remains—an option long gone for the General.
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