historical fact by drawing attention to the way history is written. The novel recreates a time in Bolívar's life that has no historical precedent, as there is no record of the last 14 days of his life. In García Márquez's account readers observe Bolívar intimately, seeing his human qualities. In the view of critic Isabel Alvarez Borland, by choosing to fictionalize a national hero in this way, García Márquez is challenging the claim of official history to represent the truth. In the "My Thanks" section of the novel, García Márquez asserts ironically that what he is writing is more historical than fictional, and he discusses his own historical methodology in detail. By posing in the role of a historian, he challenges the reliability of written history from within the writing process. According to Alvarez Borland, this serves to "remind us that a claim to truth is not the property of any text; rather it is the result of how a historian (as a reader) interprets the facts". The General in His Labyrinth also confronts the methods of official historians by using an oral style of narration. The narration can be considered an oral account in that it is woven from the verbal interactions of everyday people. Alvarez Borland explains that the advantage of this technique, as discussed by Walter Ong, is that "the orality of any given culture, residing in the unwritten tales of its peoples, possesses a spontaneity and liveliness which is lost once this culture commits its tales to writing." The oral style of narration therefore provides a truthfulness which official history lacks. Alvarez Borland concludes that The General in His Labyrinth suggests new ways of writing the past; it takes account of voices that were never written down as part of official history. The historian Ben Hughes commented on the novel: "The Liberator's British confidants, including Daniel O'Leary, were amongst the closest figures to the general in this period. Nevertheless, they are ignored in the novel. Instead, Márquez uses the character of a fictional Colombian servant, José Palacios, as The Liberator's final sounding board, thereby neatly sidestepping the more complex reality." In Hughes's view, modern South American literature has played a role in cleansing the national memory of British soldiers' assistance to The Liberator. Comparisons with other García Márquez novels In an interview published in the Colombian weekly on March 20, 1989, García Márquez told María Elvira