Chronicle Of A Death Foretold Magical Realism Essay
437 Words2 Pages
Throughout the novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez employs his use of journalistic techniques and magic realism to help the reader maintain contact with reality. One of Marquez’s best technique in the novel was the way in which he incorporated magic realism. I believe that he uses magic realism in the story to illustrate details about all the characters that are not essential or important to the story, but nevertheless interesting. When we read the opening of the book, the narrator is describing Santiago’s dream, “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” (). When I had…show more content… This makes the story more ambiguous, so that, we have to continue reading to clarify what has actually happened and what is the truth. Another technique that was very evident in the novel, was Marquez’s use of repetition and foreshadowing. Throughout the book, the one phrase that was repeated was, “on the day they were going to kill him…” This phrase was repeated so many times that I got sick of hearing it. It wasn’t really hard to miss that someone in the book was going to die, given the title of the book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Several events were foreshadowed from the beginning of the book, Santiago's death being one, his mother’s loneliness, and that the Vicario brothers had killed Santiago. These events made me feel like everything in the book was certain to happen, which is the trap Marquez wanted us to fall into. The townspeople believed they couldn’t prevent Santiago's death but it was out of ignorance that he died. The way I had viewed it was, well Marquez tells us he already died therefore it was inevitable, but when he reveals the climax and the events leading to the death, it shows that his death was