Simon Bolivar, one of the most important South American leaders of independence within the areas of Spanish colonialism in South America, left behind an epistolary of 2815 letters. Our proposal starts off with the display of the narrative epistolary project and soon encounters one of its highlights in the course of the reading, which is the general's own resignation. The several requests of resignation from his administrative position, and the justifications that followed them had taken me to the analysis of what I called the memory of the indispensability. After investigating this speech in the epistolary, the relationship between literature and the biography had been fundamental in improving our understanding of the substance of this memory of the indispensability in the epistles. This article intends to compare Simon Bolivar's letters and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, The General in His Labyrinth. The hypothesis is that the literary text, besides using Bolivar's epistolary to construct its character and the romantic scenario, opens possibilities of explanations concerning the project of memory arising from the writings in the letters, at the same measure in which it strengthens the cult of the Liberating General.
Memory; Letters; History; Literature