Chronicle Of A Death Foretold: How Honor Deceived Us All
1297 Words6 Pages
Randy Ulatowski
Writing Assignment
Chronicle of a Death Foretold – How Honor Deceived Us All In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Dearth Foretold, both honor and deception are main themes throughout. The majority of the novel takes place in 1951 in an extremely catholic town in Latin America. The first few pages of the novel summarize the events surrounding the murder of Santiago Nasar, a man who is of taking the virginity of Angela Vicario. On Vicario’s wedding night, after discovering that she had not been abstinent, Angela Vicario’s husband, Bayardo San Roman, returns her to her house. Angela Vicario’s brothers, Pedro Vicario and Pablo Vicario, ask her who took her virginity, and she reveals that it was Santiago Nasar. The brothers…show more content… If our current society would never question any action taken to preserve an individual’s honor, the world that we know could crumble and cease to exist. On the contrary, honor is taken so seriously in the novel because it believed to be a moral trait that it becomes vital for a functioning society. The reader sees how imperative honor to maintain an effective community when the majority of the town turned its head when the Vicario brothers had to restore honor to their family. Although most of the world’s current population doesn’t see how that assassination can be justifiable, preserving one’s honor is too big of a factor to ignore. Marquez uses character development to demonstrate honor when Bayardo San Roman takes Angela Vicario back home after their wedding night and Marquez reveals that she had intercourse out of wedlock. Angela Vicario remembers her mother “Holding me by the hair with one hand and beating me with the other with such a rage that I thought she was going to kill me” (Marquez 47). Honor becomes directly responsible for one death in the novel and also accountable for Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman’s divorce. Marquez also uses honor in the justice system and since the Vicario brothers were tried for the murder of Santiago Nasar, their lawyer had to…show more content… One example of this is his description of the local brothel, which sounds so nice that the reader at first has trouble discerning what exactly Maria Alejandrina Cervantes does—though she isn’t perfect, the description that her house looks so attractive that if one were to skim over the details, they might see her house as a stylish mansion. Marquez uses magical realism in Chronicle of a Death Foretold to illustrate details about characters that are not at all essential to the plot, though they are intriguing. In the opening of the book, the narrator discusses the dream that Santiago Nasar has right before his death, "He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit” (3). This sort of element works against the investigative style of the story, and shows the reader numerous different puzzle pieces between reality and fiction that they then have to place together. Dreaming is a continuous theme in the novel; Marquez gives the reader characters that have dreams, and those dreams are the main sources of happenings that come true. Magical realism is portrayed through dreams which are used in the novel to foreshadow, in most cases, the dreams