43 pages • 1 hour read
Gabriel García Márquez, Transl. Gregory RabassaA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The General’s body, as a motif, is the site of the story; it is the vessel through which power lives and fate orchestrates death—either his own or others. His feet are one of his most pronounced physical attributes. The narrator repeatedly describes the “great feet of an illusory monarch” or the “great feet of a senile elephant” (206, 221). In both cases, while his feet are monstrous and validate his physical presence, they are but a symbol of the encasement which will be his inevitable demise.
The General’s body is easily imitated by Patricio or José which suggests that the physical presence of the General is of no consequence to power—instead his body only represents power. Márquez emphasizes this by continually returning to a dead body that may or may not be the General. In fact, when people do encounter the General’s actual body, like when Manuela sees him for the first time, she sees “his baggy linen suit as if there was nobody inside, his enormous dead man’s shoes” (70), further demonstrating that his body is only a vessel for power and does not constitute power.
The comet symbolizes time for the General. It comes to represent the earliest days of his regime and the perpetuation of his rule. The General “had been conceived to see [the comet] once but that he was not to see it again” (75), suggesting that he was fated to die before the next cycle of the comet. However, the comet does pass, and the General lives.
The comet then draws attention to the fact that his rule continues through time. After the comet passes, “[t]he official organs proclaimed the passage of the comet as a victory of the regime over the forces of evil” (77). Manuela understands the perpetuity that the passing comet symbolizes; she feels trapped by the General’s power and flees during the eclipse. The cycle of the comet first serves to mark a specific segment of time and then represents the irrelevance of time in the face of the General’s long rule.
The sea is the one thing that the general won’t surrender. It is the one object which ties him to his nation and power. When he eventually does, engineers carrying it off “in numbered pieces to plant if far from the hurricanes in the blood red dawns of Arizona” (232), he dies shortly after. The absence of the sea in service to foreign aid reveals that he finally surrendered his nation to powers other than his own. It represents the futility of The Pursuit of Power; when the General sells it, it denotes his decline.
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