36 pages • 1 hour read
Alejo CarpentierThe Kingdom Of This World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Night of the Statues”
The exiled queen and princesses take up residence in Rome, and Soliman accompanies them, passing himself off to locals as a relative of Christophe. His Blackness is a source of fascination for the locals. Out with his lover, he comes upon a patio of marble statues. One is of a naked woman: As he touches it, he realizes it is the tomb of Pauline Bonaparte. He loses touch with reality and jumps to the street. He is inconsolable and prays to Papa Legba.
Part 4, Chapter 2 Summary: “The Royal House”
In Haiti, Ti Noël has furnished Lenormand de Mézy’s former plantation with looted goods from the palace. He wears Christophe’s coat and speaks continuously to people and objects. Old and experiencing cognitive changes, he gives long speeches to his “subjects” and creates orders of knights, inducting passersby. He holds parties in his “palace.”
Part 4, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Surveyors”
Surveyors from Port-au-Prince arrive. They are of multiracial background and become “the new masters of the Plaine-du-Nord” (124). They are light-skinned, and the narrator says that none of the Black revolutionaries—even King Christophe—could have foreseen their dominance. Ti Noël is tired of seeing the seemingly inevitable “rebirth of shackles” (125). He develops the ability to transform into an animal and tries to escape humankind.
Part 4, Chapter 4 Summary: “Agnus Dei”
Ti Noël tries to make a life among geese because their species seems democratic, but they reject him because he cannot prove his lineage. He achieves a moment of understanding: Macandal transformed himself “to serve humans” (129). He comes to understand that suffering and waiting are all that comprise life, but humanity can only find greatness by laboring in the Kingdom of This World. Ti Noël decides to declare war against the new enslavers. At that moment, a huge wave falls on the plantation, destroying it and killing Ti Noël.
Part 4, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
These chapters reveal the aftermath of the rebellion against King Christophe. His wife and children are free in Rome, although Soliman’s experiences in particular highlight the inescapability of Blackness in colonizing nations.
Back in Haiti, these chapters stress the seeming inevitability of the abuse of power and the emergence of a dominant class. After three uprisings, the Black residents of Haiti face enslavement once again, this time at the hands of light-skinned Black surveyors from the port city. This is something that none of the characters would have predicted because Black solidarity through Vodou and other shared experiences has been stressed throughout the book. King Christophe seems to fail in part because he rejects his subjects’ beliefs. These surveyors, by contrast, seem to lack both solidarity and aspirations to whiteness. Their arrival puts an end to Ti Noël’s mock rule at Lenormand de Mézy’s, which functioned as a parody of the power wielded first by the white enslavers and then by Christophe. In the face of this new regime, even this form of resistance is doomed.
It does, however, give way to a different kind of resistance: In these chapters, Ti Noël finally gains the kinds of magical powers, rooted in The Power of Nature, that his revolutionary heroes possessed. He tries to use them to escape but realizes he must use them to benefit humanity. It is a grand irony, then, that the book ends with his disappearance from Earth at the hand of nature.
The final chapter’s religious allusions double down on this irony while developing the theme of Catholicism Versus Vodou. Ti Noël’s belief in the importance of the “kingdom of this world” refutes Jesus’s proclamation of the primacy of the spiritual and its removal from earthly matters: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18.36). The novel, with its depiction of Vodou as a revolutionary force, posits no such distinction between the earthly and the spiritual. The title of the chapter, however, translates to “Lamb of God”—an epithet for Jesus. Despite Ti Noël's determination to use his divinely inspired powers to change the existing world, the novella ultimately (and ironically) frames him as a Christ figure.
Ti Noël (whose name, notably, means “Christmas” in French) would no doubt resent this framing, as the idea of Christian martyrdom echoes his and other enslaved Haitians’ sense that they sacrifices for the Christian god. However, if Ti Noël’s death is a kind of martyrdom, it is not entirely purposeless, as the same wave that kills him also destroys the plantation where so much suffering has occurred. The mood of the book’s conclusion (like that of the work as a whole) is grim, but the destruction of the plantation implies that nature may succeed in eradicating injustice even if humanity fails to do so.
