THE MARQUEZIAN PATRIARCH: AN DEMYTHICIZED MESSIAH
THE MARQUEZIAN PATRIARCH: AN DEMYTHICIZED MESSIAH

Summary/Abstract: In his much-praised novel “The Autumn of the Patriarch”, Gabriel García Márquez offers a compressed account of Latin America’s endless history of dictatorial regimes through the archetypal image of the patriarch ‒ “an inconceivably old dictator who ends up alone in a palace full of cows”. Concealed behind the masquerade that his entire life and government represent, the patriarch’s true identity is a conundrum waiting to be deciphered. Bearing in mind the popular perspective that García Márquez uses in order to achieve the distortion of power, we embark on the quest of revealing the patriarch’s real self and thus his human side. The spatio-temporal coordinates, the extraordinary birth, or the recurrent obsessions that symbolically characterize the patriarch are key elements which help us dismantle the concentric closed circles that protect him and draw near an autumnal character who is finally stripped of his everlasting mythical aura.

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