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45 pages 1 hour read

Gabriel García Márquez

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1981

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Themes

Honor and Violence

Chronicle of a Death Foretold explores life in a highly patriarchal society. In this society, different genders have different cultural expectations. These expectations are expressed through honor and violence, particularly when it comes to policing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Throughout the novella, these notions of honor and violence are revealed to be intertwined, destroying lives indiscriminately.

In the town, women are measured against the Virgin Mary in terms of their “purity.” They are expected to be non-sexual beings, subservient to men, and traded in marriage as though they are property. In turn, men are expected to use violence to police this social arrangement. When Angela’s affair is exposed, her family honor is considered to be tainted. The twins are expected to enact violence against Santiago as a matter of course, something which every person in the town understands. Santiago is considered to have taken something of value, so he must be punished with violence. The brothers believe themselves to be innocent, which is a common belief in the community. Indeed, Pablo’s wife, Prudencia, later insists that she only married Pablo because he was willing to uphold his family’s honor through the use of violence. Eventually, the murder is categorized as a matter of honor, which allows the townspeople to put it in the past, at least in a legal sense.

The categorization of the murder as a matter of honor is a legal question which is answered despite a lack of investigation. Angela confesses that Santiago is the man with whom she had an affair, and no further investigation is conducted. Indeed, she later tells the narrator that she said Santiago’s name only because she felt that her brothers would never harm him. For his part, the narrator cannot remember a time when his good friend Santiago was ever alone with Angela, much less when he showed any romantic interest in her. The narrator speculates that Santiago was a convenient name which Angela shared with her family in a final attempt to preserve her honor, and this attempt led, inevitably, to violence.

Like the Vicario family, the community also accepts Angela’s accusation at face value as an act of self-preservation. In the wake of the murder, the townspeople feel guilty for their inaction, and honor becomes a reasonable justification for a murder which they allowed to transpire. Rather than a community having to interrogate their shared cultural flaws or their own mistakes, they maintain the continued link between honor and violence. The convenient relationship between honor and violence allows for a lack of self-reflection and accountability.

In this sense, violence is a public performance. The twins tell everyone that they are going to kill Santiago because they want people to know; they publicly link violence and honor as a spectacle. The murder becomes a theatrical reclamation of honor, but it is inherently flawed, as the violence does not repair the family’s reputation. The family leaves, with Angela dressed in bright red to demonstrate how little she mourns. Honor and the violence used to police are not fixed or immutable ideas: They only have power because people invest them with power, especially in the public sphere. They are social constructs with the opportunity to evolve, grow, and change. Just as the narrator notes that the saying of mass in Latin has changed in the church, seemingly immutable ideas fade over time as they are publicly proven to be hollow and meaningless. Despite the public nature of the violence, the townspeople are not ready to have a conversation about their corrosive system of honor.

The Complicity of the Crowd

Chronicle of a Death Foretold treats Santiago’s murder as an inevitability. The narrator, like so many other people in the crowd, unconsciously regards the chain of events as unbreakable, as though there was nothing he could do to interfere even when he is in control of the narrative. However, the townspeople remain scarred by the murder and wrestle with lingering feelings of guilt. In this way, the novella explores the problematic issue of the complicity of others in violence.

This feeling of helplessness is evident from the very first sentence, which announces to the audience that the protagonist will not survive the day. In the rest of the town, there is the emerging sense that no one needs to actually warn Santiago of the twins’ plan because someone else will surely have done so already. Alternatively, they dismiss the possibility of the murder as ridiculous or impossible. The end result is that everyone stands idly by as a man is murdered without any form of legal framework being implemented.

The crowd understands that the twins have killed for honor but characters such as the narrator are keenly aware of the potential holes in the story about Santiago and Angela’s. This is not to say that Santiago is a good man; he is known for sexually abusing women and having frequent sexual affairs, which is the litmus test for morality imposed on women. As such, Santiago is not an innocent man, but he may be innocent on the particular count for which he is murdered. The crowd’s failure to prevent the murder is framed as an unspoken travesty of justice from which no one truly recovers, leaving a lasting impression on the narrator and everyone else.

As well as inaction on the day of the murder, the crowd is complicit in Santiago’s death because of its hypocrisy. The different gender expectations are deeply ingrained in the society: Unmarried women are expected to remain abstinent and to maintain their family honor. Meanwhile, men visit brothels and prey on underage women who are in lower-status positions, such as both Santiago and his father sexually harassing their domestic servants. The town also understands the communal idea of honor, accepting that the murder of Santiago is conducted on this basis. They never question whether this is a rational or sensible system, but it is convenient as a way to justify the murder after they have failed to intervene. The narrator hints at this hypocrisy but, since he is part of it, never truly criticizes it. Hypocritical gender expectations are one of the main causes of the dispute, but the townspeople would rather not examine their hypocrisy as a potential cause of violence.

As a result, the novella is not about Santiago, Bayardo, Angela, or the narrator. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is about the town and how the inaction of the community—through their values, inaction, and hypocrisy—failed to prevent a murder. There is a subconscious awareness of the murder as a symbol of social failure, which is why they spend so many years discussing the matter. In a literal sense, the crowd watches helplessly as Santiago is murdered by the twins at the end of the novel. The complicity of the crowd is not limited to this single moment. Instead, the hypocrisy and the refusal to examine their flaws leads the townspeople to sow the seeds of the murder many years before any blood was shed.

The Reconstruction of Memory

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is written by a narrator who is returning to a tragic event which occurred many years before. To construct this narrative, the narrator must reconstruct his memories as well as the memories of others. He gathers together as many accounts of the murder of Santiago Nasar as he can, including accessing as many official resources as possible. The novella explores how reconstructing memory is inevitably a flawed, incomplete, and deeply subjective process.

The narrator quickly discovers that many of the accounts of his friend’s murder are contradictory. Memory can be so flawed and skewed by personal experience that people cannot agree on something so seemingly ubiquitous and simple as the weather. Furthermore, the official sources are riddled with faults. The man who conducted the official autopsy had no experience or expertise, meaning that the information he provided was practically worthless. It was used anyway. Meanwhile, the magistrate who was employed to review the case and create the official account is considered overly literary. Even then, large parts of the official account have been destroyed in a flood. Thus, the narrator can rely neither on people’s memories nor official documentation. As such, in trying to create an official, objective version of events, the narrator succeeds only in illustrating the fractured and contradictory nature of memory itself.

The result is perhaps Márquez’s most postmodern novel. The structure of the novel, with the non-linear timeline, further disrupts fundamental, objective aspects of reality. Even the linear passage of time cannot be relied upon in a world where everything is experienced subjectively. Instead, the narrator is left with a series of competing narratives which he must weave together into a unified metanarrative. He patently fails in this, only serving to illustrate the inherent complexities of the case. Fundamental truths are left unanswered: Angela’s confession, for instance, is never lawfully investigated. All that is left is a series of subjective realities which make sense to those involved.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is an attempt to find atonement through the acceptance that objective truth is impossible to achieve. Memory cannot be reconstructed in its entirety, but it can provide catharsis, at least for some people. Those who accept the fundamental untruth of the world, such as Angela, are those who come closest to achieving happiness while those who pursue objective truth, such as the narrator, must deal with failure.

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