<P> Palencia - Roth notes that critics have been struck by the humorless elegiac style of The General in His Labyrinth; its dark mood and somber message is similar to that of The Autumn of the Patriarch . Love is a theme common to both Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth, but the latter is considered a tragedy . These two novels have been used to demonstrate the range of García Márquez's work . </P> <P> Isabel Alvarez Borland, in her essay "The Task of the Historian in El general en su laberinto", claims that "...while El general en su laberinto is in many ways a continuation of García Márquez's criticism of Latin America's official history seen in his earlier works, the novel contrasts sharply with his previous fictions". In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, according to Alvarez Borland, the narrator challenges the truth of official language . 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". </P> <P> In a summary of Edward Hood's book La ficcion de Gabriel García Márquez: Repetición e intertextualidad, García Márquez is characterized as an author who uses repetition and autointertextualidad (intertextuality between the works of a single author) extensively in his fiction, including in The General in His Labyrinth . Hood points out some obvious examples of repetition in García Márquez's works: the themes of solitude in One Hundred Years of Solitude, tyranny in Autumn of the Patriarch, and the desire for a unified continent expressed by Bolívar in The General in His Labyrinth . An example of intertextuality can be seen in the repetition of patterns between books . For example, both Jose Arcadio Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Bolívar in The General in his Labyrinth experience labyrinthian dreams . </P> <P> Critics consider García Márquez's book in terms of the historical novel, but differ over whether the label is appropriate . 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". On the other hand, reviewer Robert Adams suggested that García Márquez had "improved on history". According to critic Donald L. Shaw, The General in His Labyrinth is a "New Historical Novel", a genre that he argues crosses between Boom, Post-Boom, and Postmodernist fiction in Latin American literature: "New Historical Novels tend either to retell historical events from an unconventional perspective, but one which preserves their intelligibility, or to question the very possibility of making sense of the past at all ." Shaw believes that this novel belongs to the first category . García Márquez is presenting both a historical account and his own interpretation of events . </P>

The general in his labyrinth by gabriel garcía márquez