In the Time of the Butterflies: Epilogue Summary & Analysis

Dedé describes how after her sisters’ deaths, people would come to her and relay their memories of that last day. Through their testimony she can now imagine what happened on the mountain road. Rufino followed the truck for a while but then passed it. Eventually the truck driver caught back up to them, as their car had been stopped and the women were being led away by guards. Patria had broken free for a moment and yelled to the truck driver to tell her family what was happening. The truck driver had then kept driving, afraid of the soldiers.

A year after Trujillo’s death there were trials for the murderers of the Mirabal sisters. The defendants said that each man killed one woman, and one killed Rufino. They beat and choked them to death, put them back in their Jeep, and pushed it off the cliff so it would look like an accident.

The murderers were sentenced to twenty to thirty years in prison, but they were all released during the “spell of revolutions” following Trujillo’s overthrow. Dedé had raised the sisters’ children without ever mentioning the names of the murderers, as she didn’t want the children to grow up hateful.

After her sisters’ deaths, Dedé had avoided the news even when it was good. Trujillo was assassinated by seven of his former “buddies” a year after the Mirabals’ deaths. Manolo, Pedrito, and Leandro were freed. Back in the present, Dedé hears Minou, who is now a professor, getting ready for bed.

Dedé remembers the day she first heard the bad news, when Mamá called her to her house. At first she thought it was a fire, but when she didn’t see her sisters Dedé panicked and screamed. At first the family was given a telegram that seemed hopeful – telling them to come to the hospital – but then they got a second telegram confirming the sisters’ deaths. Dedé cannot remember the details of what followed, but others said she was crazed with grief and pushed past the guards to the morgue. Dedé cut off Mate’s braid and kept it.

As Jaimito and Dedé drove the coffins home, people emerged from their houses. People had been told that it was a car accident, but everyone knew it was murder. People threw flowers onto the coffins as they drove past. When they passed the SIM office, Dedé screamed “Assassins!” Jaimito asked if she wanted to die too, and Dedé said yes, that she wanted to be with her sisters. Jaimito then said that her martyrdom was “to be alive without them.”

In the present, Dedé asks Minou about her baby Camila. Dedé then remembers talking to the sisters’ husbands. Manolo explained that they were transferred back to the capital on the day of the murder. They were then all gathered together with Johnny Abbes and some other torturers, who told them the news of their wives’ deaths.

After Trujillo’s fall, The government built a monument to the Mirabals, and one day the new president had dropped by to visit it. He had talked to Dedé and promised to make the nation proud, and to get rid of those who had overseen the sisters’ deaths. He had seemed to look at their portraits as he talked, as if asking for the butterflies’ approval. This meeting gave Dedé hope that the girls had not died for nothing.

There had then been another coup, though, and Dedé had stopped receiving visitors and avoided the news. Manolo had been a revolutionary hero, but he was driven into hiding in the mountains and eventually killed. Back in the present, Minou asks Dedé why she still gives her time to all the visitors curious about the sisters.

Dedé wonders to herself how she became the “oracle,” the one who tells all the stories of the Mirabal sisters for the world to hear. Sometimes she and her friend Olga have dinner, and Olga warns Dedé that she is living in the past, trapped in the same old house, surrounded by her sisters’ things. Dedé responds that she doesn’t feel trapped in the past, she has just kept its memory alive in the present.

Dedé decides about herself becoming the “oracle” – the talker instead of the listener. It was after all the revolutions and violence were over, and the Dominican people needed a story to believe in. It was then that Dedé started talking about the butterflies.

In the present Dedé looks out at the dark garden and hears Minou talking to her husband on the phone. She sounds just like Minerva did. Dedé remembers her own breast cancer of years before. She starts to make a list of losses, just as she used to list the inventory in Papá’s store. Manolo was killed three years after Minerva. Pedrito was restless, and soon married a young girl. Leandro left politics and became an architect, building many buildings in the capital.

Mamá lived for twenty years after her daughters’ deaths, and Dedé and Jaimito stayed together while Mamá was alive, but separated after that. Dedé and Mamá split up raising the sisters’ children. Dedé remembers when Minou first met her current husband, Doroteo. Mamá had advised her to stay in school and wait to marry, and Dedé had marveled at how her advice had totally changed from when Minerva was young.

Mamá died peacefully, and her death seemed almost unreal to Dedé because it came without violence or anger. Dedé now realizes that she is the next one to die. She tries to think of the “losses” as free people each going their own way.

Dedé had met Lío once at a reception honoring the butterflies. Dedé dislikes these events, with everyone blaming everyone else for past evils, or else absolving everyone so they themselves will be forgiven, until everyone seems like “one big rotten family of cowards.” At this event Lío greets Dedé, who is shocked and hardly recognizes him. Lío has a young wife, and he catches up with Dedé. He reminds her of “what the girls have done,” the current state where there are free elections and rising tourism, where “the cemetery has begun to flower.”

As she drives home from the reception Dedé thinks about the current state of the Dominican Republic. It is certainly better than it was under Trujillo, but it still seems a disappointing result for the butterflies’ sacrifice.

Back on the night of the interview, Dedé helps Minou to bed and they discuss Minou’s child. Dedé feels that Minou’s happiness is a sign of her own success, teaching Minou not to grow up bitter and vengeful, but it still seems sad that Minou can be happy in light of her parents’ murders. Minou asks about Fela saying the girls are at rest, and Dedé says that they can perhaps let them go now.

Dedé is an excellent life insurance salesman, and she has won a prize trip this year. As she lies in bed she thinks that maybe she will ask to go to Canada. She met a man in Barcelona (last year’s prize trip) who was from Canada, and he described the beautiful leaves in the autumn. He had said “it is the sweetness in them that makes them burn.” Dedé thinks about her sisters, and how this could describe them as well.

Sometimes at night Dedé thinks she can hear her sisters’ footsteps, but tonight all is silent. Dedé closes her eyes and can see the faces of her sisters and parents, and then she realizes that she is the one missing in her mental image – “the one who survived to tell the story.”