Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

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In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1981 novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the story recalls the happenings aiming to the eventual death and homicide of bachelor Santiago Nasar, a man mistakenly incriminated of taking the virginity of a bride named Angela Vicario without any evidence to prove the assertion, and the responses of the citizens who realized the arrangement to murder Nasar in the name of degraded honor. This highly intricate novella assimilates multiple literary techniques, all for the readers to deduce who is to blame for Santiago Nasar’s death. Marquez uses techniques such as foreshadowing and the structure of the story, along with themes such as violence, guilt, and religion to address the question of blame. Although Santiago Nasar…show more content…
There are many cases of this foreshadowing, including the first sentence of the story that lets the reader know the untimely fate of Santiago Nasar. “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. 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” (Marquez 3). This establishes a sense of foreboding at the very beginning of the novel, setting the stage for his inevitable death, leaving the readers with the question of who is to blame. Along with this sense of foreboding, there is also foreshadowing through omens in his dream stated above. “We, the readers, are told that Santiago’s subconscious is warning him of the danger. But in order for the dream to become an omen it must be missed, just as the painted nail seen protruding from the wall is successful only if first someone tries to hang a hat from it. The present is visited in prophetic dreams by the future, but the future is in disguise” (Pope 188). Santiago’s mother, Placida Linero, was an accurate interpreter of dreams, yet she did not notice the ominous presence surrounding his dream,…show more content…
Instead, it exhibits a journalistic aesthetic that completely transposes what the title infers. “Interviews and the actual events they treat— the distant past and a more recent past— conflate as the narrator shifts his focus frequently and without warning from the murder to its subsequent verbal versions” (Zamora 109). This journal-like prose is used for the reader to reveal the motives regarding his death, instead of the perpetrators, which are already known. The sudden transition of the narrator’s recollection and the revision of memory through time by the citizens casts a feeling of doubt, even when the solution seems obvious. Even though it appears the resolution to his death is found, there is an element of uncertainty. “The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and mission assigned to us by fate” (Marquez 96). Even though the journal-like writing is effectual at delivering the events in a credible way, it does not make the tellings less subjective. This part of the story states a need for the community to identify what happened concerning Santiago Nasar’s death but it also
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