The Autumn of the Patriarch

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses murder, suicide, and sexual assault.

Márquez explores the ambiguity and unruliness of power through the General, demonstrating that one can exercise but never possess ultimate power—especially over death and love. Though the narrator reflects that, in the earlier part of the General’s regime, “power was a tangible and unique matter, a little glass ball in the palm of his hand” (49), it eventually evades the general and anyone who attempts to steal it from him, save the foreign powers that eventually take everything that the General has. The “glass” used to represent this power is indeed fragile and potentially dangerous.

Power is precarious in the novel; anyone who can gain the upper hand on the General can steal his power from him, even if only for a moment. The glass ball continues as a symbol of power when the General tells a visitor in his office that “this little glass ball […] is something a person has or doesn’t have, but only the one who has it has it, boy” (98). The paradox inherent in this idea is that anyone can take power; in the novel, the wrong people so often do.