The Great Dictator carried off to a hospital. Twenty years later, still suffering from amnesia, the Private leaves the hospital to return to his previous profession as a barber in the ghetto. The ghetto is now governed by Schultz, who has been promoted in the Tomainian regime under the ruthless dictator Adenoid Hynkel (also Chaplin). The Barber falls in love with a neighbor, Hannah (Paulette Goddard), and together they try to resist persecution by military forces. The troops capture the Barber and are about to hang him, but Schultz recognizes him and restrains them. Meanwhile, Hynkel tries to finance his ever-growing military forces
Dictator novel traces the development of this theme from “as far back as Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s and Francisco López de Gómara’s accounts of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico.” The nineteenth century saw significant literary reflections on political power, though on the whole the dictator novel is associated with the Latin American Boom, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. For critic Gerald Martin, the dictator novel marks the end of the Boom and even (as he says of Roa Bastos's "I, the Supreme") “the end of an entire era in Latin American history, the era which had stretched from Sarmiento's "Facundo"