SOURCE: Mejía, Adelaida López. “Burying the Dead: Repetition in El otoño del patriarca.” MLN 107, no. 2 (March 1992): 298-320.

In the following essay, Mejía examines the relationship between the dictator and populace as portrayed in The Autumn of the Patriarch.

Of course, there is no need of a signifier to be a father, any more than to be dead.

—Jacques Lacan¹

I

The figure of the unburied corpse, which Gabriel García Márquez evokes with an epigraph from Antigone in his first novel La hojarasca, returns in El otoño del patriarca (OP) with the force of an obsession.² In the later novel, at the beginning of each chapter, a first-person-plural narrator describes the dead body of the dictator. Although this narrative voice repeatedly splinters into first-person singular and third-person narrators, it never fails to recompose itself into the first-person plural, whenever a new chapter...