Samper, "At bottom, I have written only one book, the same one that circles round and round, and continues on." 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". Like the Patriarch in García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, Bolívar was an absolute dictator. The Patriarch is never identified by name; Bolívar, too, is identified chiefly by his title. 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. In his belief that life is controlled by fate, the General resembles Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Santiago Nasar in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. 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. Isabel Alvarez Borland, in her essay "The Task of the Historian in ", claims that " ... while 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". In a summary of Edward Hood's book , García Márquez is characterized as an author who uses repetition and (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