Breaking with the traditional heroic portrayal of Bolívar El Libertador, García Márquez depicts a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted.

[2] Following the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), García Márquez decided to write about the "Great Liberator" after reading an unfinished novel by his friend Álvaro Mutis.

García Márquez spent two years researching the subject, encompassing the extensive memoirs of Bolívar's Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel Florencio O'Leary, as well as numerous other historical documents and consultations with academics.

[5] García Márquez researched a wide variety of historical documents, including Bolívar's letters, 19th-century newspapers, and Daniel Florencio O'Leary's 34 volumes of memoirs.

He identifies with Bolívar in many ways, since their method of controlling their anger is the same and their philosophical views are similar: neither "pays much attention to death, because that distracts one from the most important thing: what one does in life".

[24] García Márquez's fictional portrait stimulated a reassessment of this historical figure, who is increasingly seen, according to Venezuelan historian Denzil Romero, "not just as a mistress but as the intelligent, independent, forceful woman she was".

[36] The novel revolves around the fictionalized figure of Bolívar and includes many minor characters who are part of the General's travelling party, whom he meets on his journey or who come to him in his memories and dreams of his past.

They include, for instance, General José María Carreño, a member of the entourage, whose right arm was amputated after a combat wound,[37] and who once revealed a military secret by talking in his sleep.

[31] One of the least developed of the minor characters is the General's wife, María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alayza, who had died, readers are told, in mysterious circumstances shortly after their marriage.

For example, Alvarez Borland points out that in the scene where the General responds to the French diplomat, his words closely reflect García Márquez's 1982 Nobel Address.

This sense of fate is introduced in the epigraph,[2] which comes from a letter written by the historical Bolívar to General Santander on August 4, 1823: "It seems that the devil controls the business of my life.

Palencia-Roth notes that the presence of these women "allows a labyrinthine exploration of his life before his final journey"[2] and suggests that García Márquez uses love as a barometer of the General's heart and health.

[2] "Despised by many of his countrymen, abandoned by all but a few aides and associates, left—during the final seven months of his life—without even the companionship of his longtime mistress Manuela Saenz, Bolívar had no choice but to die of a broken heart.

As García Márquez scholar Isabel Rodríguez Vergara notes, the number three—the Trinity which occupies a vital place in the symbology of the Catholic Mass—is repeated 21 times throughout the book.

[55] Latin America's history and culture, Alonso suggests, began with the loss of Bolívar's dream of a united continent and as a result has developed under a melancholy shadow ever since.

In the view of critic Isabel Alvarez Borland, by choosing to fictionalize a national hero in this way, García Márquez is challenging the claim of official history to represent the truth.

Alvarez Borland concludes that The General in His Labyrinth suggests new ways of writing the past; it takes account of voices that were never written down as part of official history.

"[18] Palencia-Roth suggests that this novel is a "labyrinthine summation ... of García Márquez's long-standing obsessions and ever-present topics: love, death, solitude, power, fate".

[62] Bolívar also invites comparison with Colonel Aureliano Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude: both characters believe the wars they have waged have been fruitless and overwhelming, and both face numerous attempts on their lives, but eventually die of natural causes.

[2] Palencia-Roth notes that critics have been struck by the humorless elegiac style of The General in His Labyrinth;[2] its dark mood and somber message is similar to that of The Autumn of the Patriarch.

However, The General in His Labyrinth "differs from these [earlier works] in employing narrative strategies which seek to answer in a much more overt and didactic fashion questions that the novel poses about history".

In his review of The General in his Labyrinth, Selden Rodman hesitated to call it a novel, since it was so heavily researched, giving Bolívar's views "on everything from life and love to his chronic constipation and dislike of tobacco smoke".

Critic Ilan Stavans, who himself praised the book as "one of the writer's most sophisticated and accomplished", attributes this to the novel's time period and to its profusion of historical information, neither of which proved attractive to English-speaking readers.

[72] Isabel Alvarez Borland notes that, like Stavans, "critics in the United States have largely celebrated García Márquez's portrait of this national hero and considered it a tour de force";[63] but she also observes that in Latin America the book received more mixed reviews, ranging from "outrage to unqualified praise".

[72] According to Stavans, they accused García Márquez of "defaming the larger-than-life reputation of a historical figure who, during the nineteenth century, struggled to unite the vast Hispanic world".

[73] More positively, Nelson Bocaranda, a Venezuelan TV commentator, considers the novel to be a tonic for Latin American culture: "people here saw a Bolívar who is a man of flesh and bones just like themselves".

Mexican author Carlos Fuentes agrees with Bocaranda saying: "What comes across beautifully and poignantly in this book is a man dealing with the unknown [world of democratic ideas]".

[74] García Márquez realistically portrays a ridiculous figure trapped in a labyrinth, magnifying the General's defects, and presenting an image of Bolívar contrary to that instilled in classrooms.

García Márquez depicts a figure who was aware of the racial and social friction in Latin American society, feared debt, and warned against economic irresponsibility.

[75] Novelist and critic Bárbara Mujica comments that the book's English translator, Edith Grossman, fully captures the multiple levels of meaning of the text, as well as García Márquez's modulations in tone.