64 pages • 2 hours read
The War of the End of the World
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Part 2, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary
At the office of the Journal de Noticías the shortsighted journalist is composing an article for Epaminondas Gonçalves. It is nighttime and the offices are almost empty.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
The article relates a stormy session of the Bahia Legislative Assembly, in which members of Gonçalves’s Progressivist Republican Party accuse the governing Bahia Autonomist Party, loyal to the Baron de Canabrava, of conspiring with England to overthrow the Republic and restore the monarchy. A shipment of English rifles and the body of an English agent, Galileo Gall, prove the connection. They call for the intervention of the Federal Army to defeat the rebels at Canudos, armed and trained by the English, who have already defeated Major Brito’s expedition. The majority accuse the republicans of conspiracy: Gall’s body and the rifles were discovered in a region controlled by their party, by the Bahia Rural Guard, which is loyal to the Progressivists. The session ends with Gonçalves reaffirming his party’s loyalty to the Republic and promising a drive to buy arms for the federal troops.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary
Gonçalves is delighted with the article. He asks the journalist if he prefers working for his paper over the baron’s. The journalist says he enjoys the work but claims to have no political convictions either way. However, he does request that, if the army sends Colonel Moreira César to put down the rebellion, he be allowed to accompany him. The colonel is famous and “it would be like seeing and touching a character in a novel” (137).
Part 2, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
By far the shortest of the novel’s four parts, at just 12 pages, Part 2 takes place entirely in the offices of the Journal de Noticías. It exhibits Vargas Llosa’s layering of paratexts within the narrative of his novel, with the inclusion in full of the nearsighted journalist’s article about a legislative session in the Bahia Assembly. He shows directly How Stories Create History. The reader is presented with the scene of the article being written, the article itself, and Epaminondas Gonçalves’s pleasure at its framing of the events. The subheading, “The corpse of the English agent” spreads the lie that is crucial to Gonçalves’s conspiracy to undermine the monarchist faction: that the English are secretly arming Canudos in support of the monarchy. Given that Gall is alive, as established in Part 1, this disinformation campaign illustrates the degree to which politically motivated narratives—as opposed to objective facts—shape the course of history.
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By Mario Vargas Llosa
