 The fact that the novel's title character, the President, is never named gives him a mythological dimension, rather than the personality of a specific Guatemalan dictator.Literary scholar Kevin Bauman notes that readers are not let into the mind of the President; instead his appearance is "continually re-evaluated, re-defined, and, ultimately, re-constructed according to his perception by others, similar to Asturias's own novelistic (re)vision of Estrada Cabrera's regime".According to literary critic Hughes Davies, the President "represents political corruption but his presentation as an evil deity who is worshiped in terms that mockingly echo religious ritual elevates him to a mythical plane" and he is "an inverted image of both the Christian and Mayan deities since he is the source only of death".