Chronicles of a Death Foretold

Thesis Statement

“Santiago Nassar's Fate to die”

Introduction

Gabriel García Márquez's novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, first published in English in 1982, is one of the Nobel Prizewinning author's shorter novels, but past and current critics agree that the book's small size hides a huge work of art. According to Jonathan Yardley in Washington Post Book World, Chronicle of a Death Foretold "is, in miniature, a virtuoso performance. The book's power lies in the unique way in which García Márquez relates the plot of a murder about which everyone knows before it happens (Ruben, 6). A narrator tells the story in the first person, as a witness to the events that occurred.

Discussion and Analysis

"The male siblings were brought up to be men. The young women were brought up to be married. They knew how to do computer display embroidery, stitch by machine, weave skeletal part lace, clean and iron, make artificial blossoms and adorned candy, and compose commitment announcements… my mother thought there were no better-reared daughters. 'They're perfect,' she was often heard to say. 'Any man will be joyous with them because they've been increased to suffer'"( Marquez, 34)

This quote displays the severity of the inhabits women lead in the reserved Colombian heritage of the town. The narrator describes the upbringing of Angela Vicario and her siblings. Women are not permitted to get jobs or pursue their own dreams; their inhabits are enclosed on all edges by custom and the anticipation to get wed and have families. All of the chores they are educated to do-washing, making flowers-are house chores. Woman's worthiness as a wife was assessed by her beauty in conjunction with her proficiency to elegantly run all aspects of a household. "Pedro Vicario, the more forceful of the male siblings, selected her up by the waist and sat her on the dining room table.' All right, girl,' he said to her, trembling with storm, 'tells us who it was.' She only took the time essential to state the name. She looked for it in the shaded, she discovered it at first view among the numerous, numerous easily bewildered names from this world and the other, and she hammered it to the partition with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose judgment has habitually been written. 'Santiago Nasar,' she said” (Marquez, 36).

This extract, taken from the end of the second chapter, recounts the view when Angela tells her male siblings who took her virginity. This happening illustrates the escapist ambiguity of Márquez's composing style that runs through the publication as a whole. The likeness of a butterfly pinned to a wall is symbolic of both Santiago Nasar's situation and of Angela Vicario's. Once she has declared that Santiago is the one who took her virginity, his destiny, like her own, becomes bounded by heritage mores. Angela Vicario herself was pinned by other darts—if she did not give her male siblings a title, they would have become furious at her for defending the ...