Juan Crisostomo Ibarra, a young Filipino chap, having graduated and lived in Europe for seven years, returned to the Philippines. Don Santiago de los Santos, a family friend also called Captain Tiago, threw a party for his honour, which was graced with the presence of friars and other well-known figures - Doña Victorina, Padre Sibyla, and ex- San Diego curate Fray Damaso Vardolagas, who derided and insulted Ibarra. Ibarra gave the cold shoulder to the insults, took no offense at what he said about him, and, relatively, excused himself warmly and left the gathering by reason of a supposedly important undertaking.
Ibarra, the day after, called round for Maria Clara, his fiancee, the pretty daughter of Captain Tiago and well-to-do resident of Binondo, Manila. Their ongoing love was undoubtedly manifested in that meeting, and Maria Clara couldn’t help but look back over the letters her dearest had put pen to paper for her before he left for Europe. Prior to Ibarra’s leaving for San Diego, Lieutenant Guevara, a gendarmerie, revealed to him the incidents preceding the demise of his father, Don Rafael Ibarra, a wealthy landowner of the town.
As said by Guevara, Don Rafael was one-sidedly accused of being a heretic, other than being a docile - a claim brought forth by Damaso on account of Don Rafael's abstention in the Sacraments, for instance confession and mass. Damaso's enmity against Ibarra's father is made worse by another incident when Don Rafael helped out on a clash between a tax collector and a child fighting, and the former's death was blamed on him, though it was not intentional. Out of the blue, all of those who thought ill of him went up with further objections. He was incarcerated, and just when the matter was almost straightened out, he died of bad health in prison. Still not pleased with what he had done, Damaso arranged for Don Rafael's dead body to be dug up from the Catholic church and brought to a Chinese graveyard, because he thought it wrong to consent to a heretic a Catholic burial ground. Sorry to say, it was raining and because of the niggling heaviness of the body, the undertakers decided to lob the corpse into a hard by mere.
Settling of scores was not in Ibarra's plans, but rather he wanted to carry through his father's plan of raising a school as he believed that education would pave the way to his country's advancement (all over the novel the author refers to both Spain and the Philippines like chalk and cheese, which form part of a same nation or family, being Spain the mother and the Philippines the daughter). Throughout the inaugural ceremony of the school, Ibarra would have been killed in a disruption had Elias - a mystifying man who had warned Ibarra earlier of a plot to kill him in cold blood - not saved him. Instead the hired killer met an untoward incident and died. The series of events proved to be too hurtful for Maria Clara who got badly ill but was coincidentally cured by the medicine Ibarra sent.
After the launching, Ibarra hosted a luncheon during which Damaso, arriving uninvited at the luncheon, again insulted him. Ibarra closed his eyes to the priest's disrespect, but when the latter disparaged the recollection of his dead father, he was no longer able to bring himself under control and sprang at Damaso, prepared to stab him for his impudence. In consequence, Damaso excommunicated Ibarra, taking this opportunity to convince the already-hesitant Tiago to forbid his daughter from getting married to Ibarra. The friar wished Maria Clara to get hitched to Linares, a Peninsular who had just arrived from Spain.
With the help of the governor-general, Ibarra's excommunication was reversed and the archbishop came to a decision to accept him as a member of the Church anew. But, as fate would have it, some incident of which Ibarra had known nothing about was blamed on him, and he was mistakenly arrested and imprisoned. The indictment against him was then taken precedence because during the proceedings that followed, nobody could bear witness that he was indeed involved. Alas, his letter to Maria Clara in some way got into the hands of the judges and was manipulated such that it then became substantiation against him by the parish priest, Fray Salvi. With Machiavellian precision, Salvi framed Ibarra and ruined his life just so he could stop him from marrying María Clara and making the latter his concubine.
In the interim, in Capitan Tiago's residence, a party was being held to proclaim the upcoming marriage of Maria Clara and Linares. Ibarra, with the help of Elías, took this chance to break out from prison. Before leaving, Ibarra spoke to Maria Clara and accused her of being disloyal to him, thinking that she gave the letter he wrote her to the jury. Maria Clara made clear that she would never work against him, but that she was compelled to submit Ibarra's letter to Father Salvi, in exchange for the letters written by her mother even before she, Maria Clara, was born. The letters were from her mother, Pia Alba, to Damaso alluding to their unborn child; and that María Clara was thus not Captain Tiago's natural daughter, but Damaso's.
Later, Ibarra and Elias ran away by boat. Elias instructed Ibarra to recline, covering him with grass to put his being there out of sight. As luck would have it, they were spotted by their enemies. Elias, thinking he could outmanoeuvre them, jumped into the water. The sentinels rained shots on him, all the while not knowing that they were aiming at the wrong man.
Maria Clara, thinking that Ibarra had been killed in the shooting incident, was, to a great extent, overcome with angst. Robbed of hope and severely disheartened, she requested Damaso to confine her into a nunnery. Damaso half-heartedly agreed when she threatened to take her own life, demanding, ‘the nunnery or death!’ Unbeknown to her, Ibarra was still alive and able to get away. It was Elias who had taken the gunshots.
On the eve of Christmas, Elias roused in the jungle seriously injured, as it is here where he instructed Ibarra to meet him. Elias, instead, found the altar boy Basilio holding his already-dead mother, Sisa. The latter lost her mind when she learned that her two sons, Crispin and Basilio, were chased out of the convent by the sexton on suspicions of stealing sacred objects. Well, it was the sexton who took the objects and only pinned the blame on the two boys. The said sexton actually slew Crispin while cross-examining him on the supposed site of the sacred objects. It was understood that the body was never found and the incident was hidden by Salví.
Elias, won over that he would die shortly, instructed Basilio to build a funeral pyre and burn his and Sisa's bodies to ashes. He told Basilio that, if no one reached the place, he would come back later on and dig for he would stumble on gold. He also let him (Basilio) know to take the gold he would find and go to school. In his dying gasp, he instructed Basilio to keep on 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.’ He passed on then.
It was put in plain words, in the epilogue, that Tiago turned out to be hooked on opium and was seen to frequent the opium house in Binondo to slake his dependence. Maria Clara became a nun where Salvi, who has lusted over her from the opening of the book, recurrently used her to fulfil his lust. One tempestuous late afternoon, a fine-looking fanatical woman was spotted at the top of the convent, shedding tears and cursing the heavens for the lot in life it has given her. Even as the woman was never known, it is put it to the readers that the said woman was Maria Clara.
The novel was a call to the affirmation of nationalised distinctiveness and the fight for parity with the vanquishers. With its presentation and examination of Spanish oppressions, it emphasised the need for transformation.
Finished when he was all of twenty-six, ‘An Eagle Flight’ was Rizal's earliest novel. He had already written essays and poems with patriotic topics up to that time.
Jose Rizal was laid blame on of being a revolutionary caused by the general idea of his book, which in a while stimulated revolutionaries in their cause.
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