The President

The President (Part II)

Oddly enough I’m quite sad to have finished this book because I really enjoyed it. I find it blatantly obvious why Asturias won the Nobel Prize for literature as this novel is dripping with excess detail. The novel always kept me on my toes because the stories were interconnected. After our class discussion I became much more aware of the figurative language and importance of word meaning. I must admit I felt a little disappointed by Angel Face’s character. I was convinced that he would lead the revolution. Unlike other characters in the novel, the Judge Advocate for instance who did not want to encourage people to hope, Angel Face showed compassion to others that I believed would encourage the people to hope and be freed them from their oppressive lives. Instead, he took on the role of loving husband to his wife.

Although there was foreshadowing of the plot revealed in class, I was hoping that somehow Angel Face would overcome his adversities. In chapter XXXI, I interpreted Angel Face to represent a Jesus figure and the President to represent Caesar. Jesus “bowed under the weight of the wooden cross, but it was to Caesar that men and women turned their admiring gaze.” (p. 217); hoping that Angel Face would rise again and bring hope to his people even though at the time the people were “admiring” the President out of fear. Basically, I wanted the people to realize that Caesar wasn’t their salvation. This interpretation had contradicted my earlier interpretation that Angel Face was the “devil” who had fallen from grace with God. In the latter case the President is like God because if one “[thinks] with the President’s mind therefore [they exist]” (p. 262). No one wanted to contradict the word or “mind” of “God” and admit that perhaps the “devil” wasn’t so bad. Towards the end of the book I returned to this metaphor of God and the devil because the “devil”, Angel Face, was eternally punished losing his body and health and later his sanity with the breaking of his heart. Not that I wanted a “devil” figure to prevail, but perhaps I felt that it would have been more inspirational if a fallen angel had regained favour with “God” ; this is most likely because a happy ending would have been more inspiring...