The Feast of the Goat part2

At a point in the novel the general is being attacked in a dream, he reaches for a gun to protect himself, but in reality, he is grabbing the alarm clock. I believe this is suggesting that the general ultimately finds comfort in punctuality and order. By ordering everything in his society, he is able to preserve his position of power, but when starts to lose grip on this ability to completely manipulate society, that’s when his security is threatened.

It’s also interesting that obsessively controls his own body in this way. Making himself get up at exactly 4 am. Maybe this is compensation for a dictator who is actually in many respects losing control of his body. It might be seen as a pathetic attempt to maintain a sense of control over himself, while at the same time he cannot even control when he urinates.

We discussed this in class, but it really is a theme we keep seeing in the dictator novel genre, the whole irony about an all powerful leader losing control of their own body. The whole being all powerful thing, while at the same time being powerless in the sense that no dictator can really control these biological processes that ultimately control them.

The dictator is also is constantly trying to emphasize the amount of physical control he has. Or he is putting make-up on to cover up darkness in his skin. We get the sense that the dictator as presented to the people is just this mask. It’s like a Wizard of Oz type thing where we find out the man behind it all, pulling all the strings is pretty pathetic. I think this idea actually came from class though, i remember talking about the wizard of oz...

But ya, in the end we get this man who rapes the girl and then is ashamed after. This is a man without self-control, who is endlessly trying to present himself as having complete control. The novel is in the end, really an attempt to lift the mask, and show what these dictators really are...