Having completed his studies in Europe, young Juan
Crisóstomo Ibarra comes back to the Philippines after a 7-year absence. In his
honor, Don Santiago de los Santos "Captain Tiago", a family friend,
threw a get-together party, which was attended by friars and other prominent
figures. One of the guests, former San Diego curate Fray Dámaso Vardolagas
belittled and slandered Ibarra. Ibarra brushed off the insults and took no
offense; he instead politely excused himself and left the party because of an
allegedly important task.
The next day, Ibarra visits María Clara, his
betrothed, the beautiful daughter of Captain Tiago and affluent resident of
Binondo. Their long-standing love was clearly manifested in this meeting, and
María Clara cannot help but reread the letters her sweetheart had written her
before he went to Europe. Before Ibarra left for San Diego, Lieutenant Guevara,
a Civil Guard, reveals to him the incidents preceding the death of his father,
Don Rafael Ibarra, a rich hacendero of the town.
According to Guevara, Don Rafael was unjustly accused
of being a heretic, in addition to being a subservient — an allegation brought
forth by Dámaso because of Don Rafael's non-participation in the Sacraments,
such as Confession and Mass. Dámaso's animosity against Ibarra's father is
aggravated by another incident when Don Rafael helped out on a fight between a
tax collector and a child fighting, and the former's death was blamed on him,
although it was not deliberate. Suddenly, all of those who thought ill of him
surfaced with additional complaints. He was imprisoned, and just when the
matter was almost settled, he died of sickness in jail. Still not content with
what he had done, Dámaso arranged for Don Rafael's corpse to be dug up from the
Catholic Church and brought to a Chinese cemetery, because he thought it
inappropriate to allow a heretic a Catholic burial ground. Unfortunately, it
was raining and because of the bothersome weight of the body, the undertakers
decide to throw the corpse into a nearby lake.
Revenge was not in Ibarra's plans, instead he carried
through his father's plan of putting up a school, since he believed that
education would pave the way to his country's progress (all over the novel the
author refers to both Spain and the Philippines as two different countries as
part of a same nation or family, with Spain seen as the mother and the
Philippines as the daughter). During the inauguration of the school, Ibarra
would have been killed in a sabotage had Elías — a mysterious man who had
warned Ibarra earlier of a plot to assassinate him — not saved him. Instead the
hired killer met an unfortunate incident and died. The sequence of events
proved to be too traumatic for María Clara who got seriously ill but was
luckily cured by the medicine Ibarra sent.
After the inauguration, Ibarra hosted a luncheon
during which Dámaso, gate-crashing the luncheon, again insulted him. Ibarra
ignored the priest's insolence, but when the latter slandered the memory of his
dead father, he was no longer able to restrain himself and lunged at Dámaso,
prepared to stab him for his impudence. As a consequence, Dámaso excommunicated
Ibarra, taking this opportunity to persuade the already-hesitant Tiago to forbid
his daughter from marrying Ibarra. The friar wished María Clara to marry
Linares, a Peninsular who had just arrived from Spain.
With the help of the Governor-General, Ibarra's
excommunication was nullified and the Archbishop decided to accept him as a member
of the Church once again. But, as fate would have it, some incident of which
Ibarra had known nothing about was blamed on him, and he is wrongly arrested
and imprisoned. The accusation against him was then overruled because during
the litigation that followed, nobody could testify that he was indeed involved.
Unfortunately, his letter to María Clara somehow got into the hands of the jury
and is manipulated such that it then became evidence against him by the parish
priest, Fray Salví. With Machiavellian precision, Salví framed Ibarra and
ruined his life just so he could stop him from marrying María Clara and making
the latter his concubine.
Meanwhile, in Capitan Tiago's residence, a party was
being held to announce the upcoming wedding of María Clara and Linares. Ibarra,
with the help of Elías, took this opportunity to escape from prison. Before
leaving, Ibarra spoke to María Clara and accused her of betraying him, thinking
that she gave the letter he wrote her to the jury. María Clara explained that she
would never conspire against him, but that she was forced to surrender Ibarra's
letter to Father Salvi, in exchange for the letters written by her mother even
before she, María Clara, was born. The letters were from her mother, Pía Alba,
to Dámaso alluding to their unborn child; and that María Clara was therefore
not Captain Tiago's biological daughter, but Dámaso's.
Afterwards, Ibarra and Elías fled by boat. Elías
instructed Ibarra to lie down, covering him with grass to conceal his presence.
As luck would have it, they were spotted by their enemies. Elías, thinking he
could outsmart them, jumped into the water. The guards rained shots on him, all
the while not knowing that they were aiming at the wrong man.
María Clara, thinking that Ibarra had been killed in
the shooting incident, was greatly overcome with grief. Robbed of hope and
severely disillusioned, she asked Dámaso to confine her into a nunnery. Dámaso
reluctantly agreed when she threatened to take her own life, demanding,
"the nunnery or death!"[2] Unbeknownst to her, Ibarra was still alive
and able to escape. It was Elías who had taken the shots.
It was Christmas Eve when Elías woke up in the forest
fatally wounded, as it is here where he instructed Ibarra to meet him. Instead,
Elías found the altar boy Basilio cradling his already-dead mother, Sisa. The
latter lost her mind when she learned that her two sons, Crispín and Basilio,
were chased out of the convent by the sacristan mayor on suspicions of stealing
sacred objects. (The truth is that, it was the sacristan mayor who stole the
objects and only pinned the blame on the two boys. The said sacristan mayor
actually killed Crispín while interrogating him on the supposed location of the
sacred objects. It was implied that the body was never found and the incident
was covered-up by Salví).
Elías, convinced that he would die soon, instructs
Basilio to build a funeral pyre and burn his and Sisa's bodies to ashes. He
tells Basilio that, if nobody reaches the place, he come back later on and digs
for he will find gold. He also tells him (Basilio) to take the gold he finds
and go to school. In his dying breath, he instructed Basilio to continue
dreaming about freedom for his motherland with the words: “ I shall die without seeing the dawn break
upon my homeland. You, who shall see it, salute it! Do not forget those who
have fallen during the night. ”
Elías died thereafter.
In the epilogue, it was explained that Tiago became
addicted to opium and was seen to frequent the opium house in Binondo to
satiate his addiction. María Clara became a nun where Salví, who has lusted
after her from the beginning of the novel, regularly used her to fulfill his
lust. One stormy evening, a beautiful crazy woman was seen at the top of the
convent crying and cursing the heavens for the fate it has handed her. While
the woman was never identified, it is suggested that the said woman was María Clara.
- Noli Me Tangere or touch me not was the most controversial novel of Jose Rizal. He did it to ridicule the friars and let the Filipinos be awaken of the greed and be able learn to fight. It contained all the immoralities of the Spaniards. We can fight in a peaceful way or manner, fighting doesn't need to be violent. We can apply our intelligence, wit and wisdom by using literature or writings. As a Filipino we should learn to be united in deeds avoiding the policy that the Spaniards brought to us.
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