The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez debuted in Spain in 1975. The English translation published in 1976. Márquez’s most notable work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 and reflects his distinct magical realist style, an artistic genre first recognized in literature in predominantly Latin American writing during the 1940s. The Autumn of the Patriarch, published seven years later, also features Márquez’s magical style and fantastical prose. The novel is a dance with language; sentences and scenes run together—sometimes for three pages at a time—to reveal the limitlessness of power as it courses through men, women, society, and land.

This study guide uses the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2006 and translated by Gregory Rabassa.

Content Warning: This study guide discusses murder and sexual assault.

Plot Summary

The General of the Universe, dictator of an unnamed city in the Caribbean, is dead in his office. But the unnamed narrators who find him aren’t convinced it could be the General, partly because of legend but also because he already died once before. In the early days of his regime, the General found a citizen, Patricio Aragonés, impersonating him among the populace. Rather than killing him, the General kept Patricio as his double, thereby avoiding assassination attempts until, finally, Patricio dies from a poisonous dart. The people assume the General is dead; his guards and officials celebrate his death until he reveals himself three days later and kills all those who oppose his rule.

The General resumes his role as a dictator without a double and, as his despotic rule continues, a resident of the nation’s poorest area asks for a special audience with her ruler. Manuela Sánchez asks for running water and electricity for her community. The despot obliges and becomes obsessed with Manuela. She visits him in a dream, and as he awakes at three o’clock in the morning, he runs around the palace ordering that the time change to eight as he does not wish to return to sleep. The General then pursues Manuela, killing or removing anyone who could be a threat to him; he destroys her neighborhood, building beautiful homes with green lawns, and eradicates everything she’s ever known. Manuela vanishes during an eclipse to escape the General’s clutches.

Soon after, a hurricane wipes out the nation. With the help of foreign aid, the nation undergoes reconstruction. To uplift the people’s spirits, the government holds a weekly lottery that the General always wins because of an elaborate scam. Children chosen from a crowd learn to select the coldest among a sack of numbered billiard balls and, because they know it's a scam, are afterward detained in the dungeons below the palace. Eventually, there are 2,000 children detained with no more room to hold them and no more children to select from the village—a secret that is becoming harder to keep. The General finally kills all 2,000 children by sinking them on a cement barge in the sea. This incites a rebellion that the General determines is part of a larger conspiracy against him orchestrated by his right hand, General Rodrigo de Aguilar. At an annual feast held for government officials, the despot serves General Rodrigo on a silver platter for dinner, carving him and asking his guards to eat him.

Bendición Alvarez, the General's mother, then dies, leaving the General in shambles. Her corpse is paraded around the nation so everyone can view and honor her, but the people become convinced her body is miraculous because she does not decay. In reality, servants repair the decomposition of her body, which was also taxidermized to preserve its appearance. The General petitions the Catholic Church to canonize Bendición as a saint. When the church declines because it cannot find an accurate account of her history, and what it does find reveals her early life as a sex worker and a beggar, the General starts a war, expelling all remnants of faith from the nation, save one nun—Leticia Nazareno—whom the General eventually pursues.

Leticia Nazareno becomes the only woman officially recognized as the General’s bride, though she never finishes her vows because she gives birth prematurely at the altar. Emanuel, the only legitimate child of the 5,000 the General has sired, and his mother are eventually torn apart by stray dogs in a public market. To find their murderers, the general hires a mercenary named José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, who kills thousands of people and tortures countless more before he is killed himself. Eventually, the General’s accumulated debt forces him to sell the sea—something he swore he’d never do.

During his 100- to 200-year rule, the General killed countless people, raped countless women, and wrote or enacted countless laws. He slowly slips into isolation, paranoia, and dementia before dying sometime between age 102 and 232.