Themes

The title names one of the novel's principal themes. As helpless as any of his less fortunate fellow citizens, as his body breaks down, riches and political power mean little as Cruz relives key episodes in a life that he finally realizes will soon be over. His dominating ego at one point even attempts to exact a deal from God, although he is the least religious of men.

In the course of his career he has come close to death on several occasions: in childhood when the hacienda owner who had made his mother pregnant would have killed Artemio had he not been betrayed and killed first; during the revolution he is wounded while deserting his men and later he escapes execution by betraying his fellow prisoners, the Indian Tobias and the lawyer Bernal, whose death he will later use as an entree into Bernal's family; and through...