Individual Oral Planning Sheet

Developing a plan for an individual oral:  

Prompt​: Examine the ways in which a global issue of your choice is presented through 
the content and form of work that you have studied. 
Global Issue: Through imagery, magical realism, and a careful selection of detail, 
Gabriel Márquez reveals the extent to which the societally-encouraged ideal of 
honor corrupts morally and religiously correct ideals. 
 
 
Passage 1: Identify your passage: pg numbers and initial words - closing words. 
 
“They burst in panting into the parish house, closely pursued by a group of 
roused-up Arabs, and they laid the knives, with clean blades, on Father Amador’s 
desk. Both were exhausted from the barbarous work of death, and their clothes 
and arms were soaked and their faces smeared with sweat and still living blood, 
but the priest recalled the surrender as an act of great dignity. ‘We killed him 
openly,’ Pedro Vicario said, ‘but we’re innocent.’ ‘Perhaps before God,’ said Father 
Amador. ‘Before God and before men,’ Pablo Vicario said. ‘It was a matter of 
honor.’ Furthermore, with the reconstruction of the facts, they had feigned a much 
more unforgiving bloodthirstiness than really was true, to such an extreme that it 
was necessary to use public funds to repair the main door of Plácida Linero’s 
house, which was all chipped with knife thrusts. In panopticon of Riohacha, where 
they spent three years awaiting trial because they couldn’t afford bail, the older 
prisoners remembered them for their good character and socialility, but they 
never noticed any indication of remorse in them. Still, in reality it seemed that the 
Vicario brothers had done nothing right with a view to killing Santiago Nasar 
immediately and without any public spectacle, but had done much more than 
could be imagined to have someone to stop from killing them, and they had 
failed.”(48-49) 
 
Author’s attitude toward the global issue (remember to include how the issue is 
portrayed in the passage itself AND how this passage relates to the work as a 
whole): 
 
 
The author, in acknowledgement of the existence of honor and its intense grip 
over society’s doings, feels as though honor should not so heavily influence the 
actions of people, especially to the point of prompting them to act on the atrocity 
that is murder.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Key strategies used in the passage to develop the author’s point about the global 
issue: (no more than 5 bullet points) 
 
● Imagery - The vivid, gory, images of bloody knives and what-not helps 
depict how horrid and gruesome the actual crime was, and in doing this it 
further builds this stark, contrasting juxtaposition of the wrong, disgusting 
crime and it’s excusal by the religious authority, and this bewilderment 
caused in the reader ties in with Márquez’s purpose in this passage: to 
emphasize how this is wrong. 
● Hybridity of two different instances in time - relates to building magical 
realism. Magical realism helps portray Márquez’s purpose in that comparing 
these two instances in time, years apart, displaying that not even the 
slightest semblance of guilt has festered within the Vicario brothers after 
they’ve been given the chance to marinate in their thoughts and actions 
after having been in prison, shows the extent to which honor has fooled 
them, the extent to which the idea of honor has tarnished their ability to feel 
remorse or guilt for the man they so crudely killed, highlighting Márquez’s 
point that its a problem. 
● Casual tone - the fact that Márquez himself is so casual and non chalant 
whilst telling the gruesome tale of Santiago Nasar’s death, based off the 
death of Cayctano, someone he actually knew, shows how normalized this 
warped sense of honor is within society, that this idea has feigned an entire 
normality, that the murder of a man in its name is not wrong, but something 
ordinary and routine to the point that Márquez’s own tone relfects this. 
● Dialogue/Selection of detail - that convo with the whole god thing - shows 
Márquez’s point to the magnitude(extent) of how much honor has 
corrupted society and how wrong it is as it has reached one of the most 
untouchable ideals in society ever created: religion. Honor has infected 
society’s mindset to the point that a religious leader, someone of authority, 
who is expected to uphold certain standards of purity and moral 
righteousness.  
● Reference back to the bishop from the earlier chapter and what that says 
about religion and its adaptation to honor. The bishop guy was in the boat, 
didn;t even stop, just waved and made the sign of the cross, and bounced, 
relates to honor’s overpowering hold in that religion, or at least its authority 
figures, has grown ignorant and the social constructs like honor have grown 
to shroud the judgement of those religiously inclined/ in charge 
(religiously)