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In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez Summary Study Guide

Detailed plot synopsis reviews of In the Time of the Butterflies


Plot Summary Part 4

I guess someone boned her in prison. Marie Teresa decides if she is pregnant that she wants to kill her baby. Then her v_gina burps out a half-formed bloody baby so Marie Teresa doesn't have to worry about strangling her unborn infant. We never find out how that baby got in there.


Eventually, the sisters get released from prison and put under house arrest. They still feel they are being unfairly persecuted, even though in any other country they would have been put in jail for life or even executed for fomenting violent revolution.


While the sisters are out of jail, their cuckolded husbands are still in jail. So they whine about their husbands a lot and pay a lot of visits. One such visit the sisters are ambushed by government operates who hit them with clubs until they are dead. Wack! Wack! Wack! Minerva, Marie Teresa, and Patria are clubbed to death. Only Dede is left alive to see the end of the Trujillo dictatorship. The guys who kill them get sentenced to decades in jail but never serve any jail time.

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The end.


Oh, by the way, the title of the book, "In the Time of the Butterflies" refers to the girls. Their communist codename was Butterflies. But butterflies are pretty, harmless insects. Butterflies don't pick up guns and kill people to install a communist dictatorship.


Literary Criticism:


There is so much to dislike about this book, I'm not sure where to start.


The characterizations in this book were very thin. The sisters seemed to be virtually identical, except for Minerva, the chief troublemaker. All the other characters were simply interchangeable names, completely forgettable. Without developed characters, the story had little meaning.


The notion that Trujillo, the ruler of the Dominican Republic, would have the time or inclination to have multiple encounters with an ordinary person like Minerva is totally unbelievable. And when that becomes the centerpiece of the story, the entire story becomes unbelievable.


Most of the story focuses on the girls moaning about being persecuted by the dictatorship. But the girls were not exactly minding their own business; they were fomenting communist revolution. One does not need to love Trujillo's dictatorship to recognize that the girls were, at least at first, let off very lightly for plotting armed insurrection to the government.


The girls act like they have done nothing wrong and are oppressed, making them very unsympathetic.


Not very much happens in this book either, most of it seems to be the girls moaning about Trujillo while in prison or moaning about Trujillo out of prison. It would have been more interesting if the girls had truly been more virtuous, peacefully demonstrating for democracy, rather than planning a violent coup to install a communist government. There also needed to be more of a story than "They got arrested--they got released--they are very upset, and praying" plot, which is all we got here.

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Note: the views expressed here are only those of the reviewer(s).
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