The Novel

Three Voices of a Dying Man

Artemio Cruz lies dying. In his final moments, his consciousness fragments into three distinct voices. The “I” — the present, the dying body, the immediate sensation of pain and the approach of death. The “You” — the future, the judgmental conscience, a voice that speaks in the future tense to a man who has no future. And the “He” — the past, the remembered life, the third-person narration of a man who can no longer claim his own history.

These three voices alternate in a hypnotic, fractured rhythm. There is no stable narrative ground. The reader is thrown from the “I” that gasps and recoils from its failing body to the “You” that whispers accusations about a life misspent to the “He” that relives the decisive moments of Cruz's sixty years. The fragmentation is not modernist trickery — it is the formal representation of a dying consciousness, a life falling apart at the moment of its end.

Twelve Days, One Life

The novel is organized around twelve key days in Cruz's life — twelve episodes, each jumping to a different moment. The dates are not in chronological order: 1955, 1919, 1924, 1941, 1939, 1947, 1913, 1934, 1955 (again), 1957, 1946, and finally 1903 — the year of his birth. The reader assembles the story like a puzzle, piecing together a life from its fragments.

These twelve days trace the arc of Cruz's life: the young revolutionary fighting in the mountains, the ambitious survivor accumulating land and influence, the ruthless newspaper baron crushing his rivals, the aging tycoon lying on his deathbed, his family gathered around him like vultures. Through it all runs the central question: how did the soldier who fought for the peasants become the landlord who exploited them?

The Story of Artemio Cruz

Artemio Cruz was a soldier in the Mexican Revolution. He fought with the peasant armies, a young officer in the forces of Venustiano Carranza. He was brave, resourceful, and — even then — pragmatic to a fault. He survived the chaos of the revolution through a combination of luck, intelligence, and moral flexibility. He understood earlier than most that the revolution's victors would not be its idealists.

After the revolution, Cruz transformed himself into a capitalist. He accumulated land — vast tracts of it, the same land the peasants had fought to reclaim. He bought newspapers and used them as political weapons. He acquired mines, timber concessions, and political influence. He married for money and position — Catalina, a woman he did not love, whose family connections smoothed his path to power.

He betrayed everyone. His revolutionary comrades, left behind or destroyed. Regina, the woman he loved, whose death in the revolution marks the moment his soul begins to die. His wife, his daughter, his mistresses — all reduced to objects in his accumulation of power. And now, at the end, he lies dying of a mesenteric infarction, his body as corrupted as the ideals he abandoned, surrounded by a family that waits for him to die so they can inherit.

The Circle Closes

The novel opens and closes on the same day — July 6, 1959 — creating a circular structure that mirrors the trap of Cruz's life. He cannot escape his dying, and he cannot escape the judgment of his own conscience. Within this single-day frame, he relives forty years of Mexican history, from 1919 to 1959. The present tense of the novel's final pages echoes its opening, a dying man who has always been dying, whose entire life has been a slow approach to this one day.

Form as Meaning

Fuentes's technique is not modernist experimentation for its own sake. Every formal choice — the shifting pronouns, the nonlinear chronology, the fractured sentences that run on for pages — serves the novel's central subject: a dying consciousness. A dying mind does not think in chronological order. It fragments, repeats, sinks into memory, surfaces into pain, circles around the same wounds. The novel's form is its content: the experience of reading it is the experience of inhabiting a mind in the process of dissolving.