Mrs. Eszter’s office in the town hall frames the new political reality of the town. Her extended internal monologue that opens the final section of the novel details the “veritable transfer of power” (285) she engineered by deliberately allowing the riot to reach an optimal level of destruction before calling for military intervention. This calculated manipulation demonstrates The Role of Fear in Totalitarianism. Mrs. Eszter’s strategy was to harness chaos rather than prevent it, creating a power vacuum that she could fill. Her triumph is one of ruthless pragmatism over what she deems the “foul marsh of illusions in which they foundered” (289), a worldview that rejects empathy and idealism as weaknesses. Her affair with the commanding colonel solidifies this new order, replacing the collapsed communist bureaucracy with a more efficient authoritarianism built on the cynical exploitation of a crisis she herself cultivated. Consequently, she has also discarded her previous lover, the chief of police, who has outlived his usefulness to her, as well as György, who abandoned the opportunity to become a figurehead in the movement when Mrs. Eszter coerced him to act. This mirrors the historical context of the Rendszerváltás in Hungary, where the fall of one system created opportunities for new, often ruthless, configurations of power to emerge from the instability.

The psychological states of György and Valuska embody the collapse of intellectual and spiritual alternatives to Mrs. Eszter’s regime. Relegated to the servants’ quarters of his own home and dismissed by his wife as a “creaking wreck” (298), György now spends his days visiting Valuska in the institution that the new regime has turned into his prison, marginalizing him for his perceived deviation from social norms, as well as his knowledge about Mrs. Eszter’s incriminating role in the regime change. György’s daily pilgrimage is both a portrait of complete defeat and a last attempt to extend sympathy in a ruined world. Their shared condition illustrates how a confrontation with overwhelming, meaningless violence results in a state deeply affected by The Impact of Futility on Human Agency. Their intellectual and intuitive pursuits are rendered impotent against the raw political power that has seized the town, leaving them as living monuments to a failed humanism.

The foundations of the new regime are exposed in Mrs. Eszter’s interview with a prospective police recruit. The candidate, a brawler who participated in the looting, provides a rambling, self-serving account of his crimes, yet Mrs. Eszter immediately sees his utility. She hires him precisely because his compromised past makes him pliable, a man “eternally obliged to the secretary” (305) and thus a reliable instrument of her will. This cynical approach to state-building, recruiting from the chaos to enforce the new order, is amplified further in her public performance at Mrs. Plauf’s funeral. She transforms the random, brutal death of her neighbor into a story of heroic martyrdom, fabricating a founding myth for her regime. To the reader who encountered Mrs. Plauf at the beginning of the novel, Mrs. Eszter’s strategy is clear. The eulogy is a deliberate fiction designed to forge unity and legitimize her authority by rewriting the recent past. This control of narrative, combined with the co-opting of criminal elements, reveals that the new order is built on strategic violence, personal obligation, and the dissemination of useful lies.

The literary form of this final section reflects the political consolidation it depicts. The narrative is dominated by Mrs. Eszter’s perspective, rendered in Krasznahorkai’s signature labyrinthine sentences that span multiple pages. This stylistic choice immerses the reader in her meticulous, self-aggrandizing, and suffocating worldview. The shift from the multiple perspectives of the novel’s earlier parts to a single, dominant consciousness formally enacts the totalitarian takeover that Mrs. Eszter has achieved. The narrative itself, like the town, has been brought under her control, forcing the reader to inhabit the logic of the new political power. The suffocating density of the prose mirrors the claustrophobic social atmosphere, where alternative viewpoints have been physically and psychologically eliminated, leaving only the relentless interiority of the victor.

As if in response to this lack of escape, the novel’s conclusion abandons human perspective entirely, shifting to a clinical, scientific description of biological decomposition. This final passage, detailing the work of the “unchained workers of decay” (310), functions as the ultimate commentary on the events of the book. The meticulous account of how enzymes and microbes dismantle a complex organism is a powerful manifestation of the motif of rubbish and decay, elevating it from a social condition to a universal law. This shift in scale confirms The Irrepressible Chaos of the Universe. All of Mrs. Eszter’s political machinations and her meticulously constructed regime are rendered insignificant in the face of this impersonal, entropic process. The narrative dissolves its own fiction into this objective, biological reality, suggesting that all human systems, be they social, political, or intellectual, are merely temporary structures destined to be broken down and consumed by the “endless momentum of chaos” (314) that governs the universe.