B.A. (Hons.

) English – Semester VI Core Course

Paper XIV : Postcolonial Literatures Study Material

Unit-2
Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Edited by: Dr. Seema Suri

Department of English

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

University of Delhi
 Paper XIV – Postcolonial Literatures
Unit-2
Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Prepared by:
Dr. Seema Suri
School of Open Learning
University of Delhi
Delhi-110007

 
SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING
UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
 Paper XIV – Postcolonial Literatures
Unit-2
Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Contents
S. No. Title Pg. No.
1. Gabriel García Márquez: A Brief Biography 01
2. Introduction 02
2.1 The Background 02
2.2 The Title of the Novel 03
2.3 The Epigraph 04
3. Study Guide to Reading and Comprehension 04
4. Critical Analysis 17
4.1 Narrative Style in Chronicle of a Death Foretold 17
4.2 The Structure of the Novel 20
4.3 Márquez’s Critique of Machismo 24
4.4 Magical Realism 29

Prepared by:
Dr. Seema Suri

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
1. Gabriel García Márquez: A Brief Biography
Gabriel García Márquez (1928-2014) was born in Aracataca, a small town near the coast of
the Atlantic Ocean, in Colombia. He was the eldest of sixteen children born to Gabriel Eligio
García, a telegraph operator, and his wife, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. For the first eight
years of his life, Márquez was brought up by his maternal grandparents. His grandmother,
Tranquilina Iguarán de Cotes, told him stories about supernatural beings and his grandfather,
Colonel Nicolas Márquez Iguarán, told the boy equally fantastic accounts based on his
participation in the Colombian civil wars in the early years of the century. In numerous
interviews, Márquez has mentioned how his literary style was influenced by his
grandmother’s impassive manner of narrating these tales. After his grandfather’s death,
Márquez’s father took him to live with the family in Sucre, where he had opened a pharmacy.
In 1947 he enrolled at the National University of Colombia in Bogota to study law, and the
same year, he wrote the first of fifteen short stories that he published in Colombian
newspapers over the next five years.
Around this time, he moved to Cartagena to work as a journalist for El Universal. In
1950, he joined El Heraldo in Barranquilla and became a member of a group writers and
intellectuals known as the Group of Barranquilla. They would read and have discussions
about the modernist techniques of novelists such as Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James
Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. It was at this point that he decided to become a writer himself and
wrote and published Leaf Storm (1955), his first novella. García Márquez spent the next three
years in Paris, where he devoted himself to his fiction, and also toured Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union. After his return to Colombia in 1958, he married his childhood sweetheart,
Mercedes Barcha.
In the late 1950s and early ‘60s, he worked in Bogotá and New York city, for Prensa
Latina, the news agency set up by Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. García Márquez published the
novella No One Writes to the Colonel in 1958. Big Mama’s Funeral, a collection of short
stories, and In Evil Hour, his first full-length novel, were both published in 1962. He moved
with his family to Mexico, where he earned a living for the next several years as a journalist
and scriptwriter. His next novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) brought him
international fame and success. It was translated into several languages and has sold millions
of copies worldwide. The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) is based on the Venezuelan
dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) is inspired by a
true incident in Colombia. In addition to these novels, he published many collections of short
stories and non-fiction as well. Most of his fiction is set in the provinces of Colombia,
bringing alive the life and struggles of its people. Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1982 for his novels and short stories in which, as mentioned in the citation, “the
fantastic and realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a
continent’s life and conflicts.” He was the first Colombian to win the prize.
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) is about a love that refuses to submit to old age and
The General in His Labyrinth (1989) is a fictional representation of Simón Bolívar,

1
Colombia’s first president. News of a Kidnapping (1996) deals with the problem of drug
cartels in Colombia. After he was diagnosed with cancer, he wrote the first part of his
memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale, which was published in 2002. His last novel, Memories of
My Melancholy Whores (2004) is about a ninety-year-old man who finds love for the first
time after hiring a fourteen-year-old prostitute. Dementia prevented Márquez from writing
anything else and he died of pneumonia in 2014. The Colombian president Juan Manuel
Santos paid a fitting tribute: “One Hundred Years of Solitude and sadness for the death of the
greatest Colombian of all time.” In 2016, the Colombian central bank honoured the country’s
greatest writer by featuring an image of Márquez on their 50,000 peso note.

2. Introduction
Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold was first published in Spanish in
1981 and it was translated into English the next year. There are many good editions available
that you could read. All references to the novel in this study-material are to this edition:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, translated by Gregory Rabassa. Penguin Books, 1996.
Read the novel before going through this study-material, which introduces you to
Márquez’s innovations in style and structure, his magical realism, and his concerns, as a
writer, with the problems of his native Colombia. Since no commentary can ever do justice to
the work of a literary giant like Márquez, you should read more about his fiction.
2.1 The Background
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is based on a murder that caused a sensation in Colombia and
beyond. On January 22, 1951 in the small Colombian town of Sucre, Margarita - a newly-
wed wife - was brought back to her parents’ home when her husband Miguel Reyes Palencia
discovered, on his wedding-night, that she wasn’t a virgin. Palencia, who belonged to a rich
landowning family, beat his wife and forced her to identify her lover. When she named
Cayetano Gentile Chimento, a friend and drinking companion of his, he gave her a knife with
which to kill him. To uphold the honour of the family, Margarita’s brothers, Victor and
Joaquin Chica Salas, killed Cayetano in the middle of the town plaza. Numerous articles
appeared in newspapers, documenting the memories, feelings, and thoughts of the people
linked to the murder.
The bride, her brothers, the accused lover, their families, and the witnesses were all
friends, neighbours or relatives of Gabriel García Márquez, who was twenty-three years old
at that time. Twenty-seven years after the murder of Cayateno Gentile, Márquez visited his
native town to gather material for a research based journalistic piece. He waited for so long
because he knew his mother would be upset to see so many of her friends and relatives in a
novel written by her son. He realized, during the course of his interviews, the impossibility of
writing an objective account of the incident and changed his strategy to write a novel based
on the incident. Three years later, on 28 April 1981 Chronicle of a Death Foretold was
published. In an interview with Mendoza, Márquez said:

2
 Still, the truth of it is that I wasn’t really gripped by the subject until, after I’d
chewed it over for many years, I discovered the vital ingredient - that the two
murderers didn’t want to commit the crime and had tried their utmost to get
somebody to prevent it, without success. This is the only really unique element in
the drama; the rest is pretty commonplace in Latin America.
You might be interested to know that, in 1994, Miguel Reyes Palencia filed a case in
court, demanding that Márquez pay him fifty per cent of the profits earned from the novel, as
it was based on his life-story, and the character of Bayardo San Román was modelled on him.
His claims were dismissed by a court in Baranquilla in 2011: “Mr Miguel Reyes Palencia
could never have told the story as the writer Gabriel García Márquez did, and could never
have employed the literary language that was actually used. The work is characterized by its
originality.” (Phillips, 2011)
Remember that, in spite of its basis in real life events, the novel is fictional. There are
many particulars in which the novel digresses from the real. The most important aspect in
which the novel differs from reality is that Margarita (Angela Vicario in the novel) and
Chimento admitted to having had a relationship but Angela’s claim that Santiago is her lover
is never established to be true. Bayardo returns to Angela but in real life, Miguel Reyes
Palencia remarried and Margarita continued to live alone. The Vicario brothers are twins
though the real-life killers were not. However, correlating fact with fiction would be a
misdirected exercise. Read the novel as you would any other work of fiction.
2.2 The Title of the Novel
The original Spanish title of the novel Crónica de una muerte anunciada, if translated
literally, would be ‘Chronicle of an announced death’ but Gregory Rabassa, the translator,
has inverted the syntax and used the apocalyptic ‘Foretold,’ instead of ‘announced.’ This is
perhaps to echo the fatalism in the novel in its title. The narrator sets out to determine the real
cause of Santiago’s murder but after his investigations are over, he resigns himself to the
conclusion that the tragedy was fated to happen. Like all the residents of this small town, the
narrator comforts himself with this theory. They are blind to the real cause of the senseless
butchering. The title of the novel is thus ironic; reflecting the inability of the community to
see the real cause of Santiago’s killing is the honour code.
Look up the word ‘chronicle’ in the dictionary. It is explained as ‘a formal account or
record of a series of events, described in the order in which they happened.’ Is that how the
narrator presents the events? Think about the sequence in which the narrator has organized
his ‘chronicle.’ Note that the five sections in the novel are not numbered. The linear sequence
is missing. The structure of the novel is akin to the gradual putting together of the pieces of a
puzzle. Again, like the word ‘Foretold,’ ‘Chronicle’ is also used ironically. The narrator
informs us that he is writing a chronicle but then presents the reader with an account of the
murder that keeps shifting back and forth in time. Pay close attention to this feature of the
novel.

3
2.3 The Epigraph
An epigraph is a short phrase or line that is used as an introduction to a book. The epigraph of
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is reproduced here:
the hunt for love
is haughty falconry.
GIL VICENTE
These lines are from a short poem by Gil Vicente (1470-1536), one of Portugal’s most
famous dramatists, who is regarded as the father of modern Portuguese drama. He wrote
many comic plays and poems in Spanish and Portuguese. In his works, he criticizes social
vices and institutions. It is significant that Gil Vicente was a defender of women who, in his
time, could not even walk on the streets without a male escort. Like the women in Chronicle
of a Death Foretold, they had a very restricted existence.
Falconry is the art of training and using birds of prey to hunt. In the epigraph, the poet
warns the falcon (the male) of the danger it courts in attacking a heron (the female). The
phrase ‘hunt for love,’ refers to the male’s pursuit of women for sexual pleasure. Another line
from the same poem is quoted by the narrator to warn Santiago when he gets into an
obsessive relationship with María Alejandrina Cervantes, the owner of the local brothel; “A
falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain” (p. 65).
In addition to the epigraph, Márquez uses images of birds throughout the novel. The
bird-shit that splatters Santiago in his dream, the night before he is killed, the bishop who
likes coxcomb soup, and the phosphorescent bird fluttering over the widower Xius’s
farmhouse: these are a few examples of bird images used in the novel. It is no coincidence
that both Santiago and his father possess falconry equipment and demonstrate their skill at the
local charity bazaars.
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold men like Santiago Nasar, his father Ibrahim Nasar, and
Bayardo are rich, privileged men who are cavalier in their treatment of women. Like
predatory birds, they pursue women for their pleasure. Ibrahim Nasar has had a relationship
with his coloured servant Victoria Guzmán, before he brought her to work as a servant in his
home. Santiago frequents the local brothel and molests Victoria Guzmán’s daughter Divina
Flor at every opportunity, although he is engaged to Flora Miguel. Bayardo decides he will
marry Angela, without attempting to win her affections. It takes Angela seventeen years of
relentless letter-writing before Bayardo returns to her. The epigraph is a metaphoric
expression of Márquez’s censure of male domination. I will discuss it in detail in section 4.3.
The critique of machismo in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

3. Study Guide to Reading and Comprehension

Note that the five sections in the novel are not numbered. This is, perhaps, to prevent any
imposition of linearity on the narrative structure of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The novel
does not have a conventional temporal framework, with a clearly discernable beginning,

4
middle, and end. For instance, the first section begins with an account of the events on the
morning of Santiago’s killing and the next one jumps to the arrival of Bayardo, six months
earlier. The word ‘Chronicle’ is used ironically in the title, drawing our attention to the
absence of a sequential narrative.
Though the novel is written in the first person, remember that the narrator should not be
identified with the author, Márquez. The two are distinct and separate identities. You should
consider the narrator as one of the protagonists of the novel.

Part I: Page 1-23

The narrator begins with the recollections of Plácida Linero, Santiago’s mother, when he
meets her twenty-seven years after her son’s murder. She recalls that it was a Monday in the
month of February and Santiago got up early in the morning, as he wanted to go and welcome
the bishop. He told his mother about a dream he had, where he was going through a grove of
timber trees and got splattered with bird-shit. She told him that it was a good omen and he
went to the kitchen to have coffee, where the coloured servant Victoria Guzmán and her
daughter Divina Flor were cooking.
Recalling that morning, Victoria Guzmán and Divina Flor tell the narrator that Santiago
didn’t look too well when he came down for coffee. He had slept only for an hour because he
was participating in the wedding festivities of Angela and Bayardo the night before. When
Santiago catches her daughter’s hand, Victoria Guzmán is openly hostile:
Victoria Guzmán showed him the bloody knife.
“Let go of her, whitey,” she ordered him seriously. “You won’t have a drink
of that water as long as I’m alive.” (p. 8)
We learn that Santiago’s father, Ibrahim Nasar was an Arab immigrant who bought a
former warehouse and converted it into a house with numerous rooms. His marriage to
Plácida Linero was one of convenience, and an unhappy one. The detailed descriptions of the
house and all the weapons in Santiago’s possession establish the superior status of the family.
We learn that Santiago shared a special bond with his father, who had died three years before.
Ibrahim Nasar has had a clandestine affair with Victoria Guzmán in her youth, after
which she was brought to his home to work as a servant. Victoria Guzmán does not want her
daughter to suffer a similar fate and tries to keep her away from Santiago as much as
possible. Santiago seems to be disturbed by the sight of Victoria Guzmán disemboweling the
rabbits in the kitchen. Read this scene carefully and note the undercurrent of animosity that
flows from her as she recalls that day. She tells the narrator that Santiago, like his father, was
“a shit” (p. 8).
Santiago leaves his house at six and meets many people on their way to the docks to
greet the bishop. The narrator takes great care to be exact about details like the time, as far as
Santiago’s movements are concerned;

5
 Furthermore: all the many people he ran into after leaving his house at five
minutes past six until he was carved up like a pig an hour later remembered him
as being a little sleepy but in a good mood, and he remarked to all of them in a
casual way that it was a good day. (p. 2)
He also accumulates other, minor bits of information, which don’t seem to contribute
much to the investigation. This is paralleled by vagueness characterizing the memories of the
people who recall the day of Santiago’s murder:
Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea
breeze coming in through the banana groves, as was to be expected in a fine
February of that period. But most agreed that the weather was funereal, with a
cloudy, low sky and the thick smell of still waters, and that at the moment of
the misfortune a thin drizzle like the one Santiago Nasar had seen in his dream
grove was falling. (p. 2)
This is not surprising, considering that he is interviewing the townspeople twenty-seven
years after the murder. When Santiago Nasar leaves his house, he is unaware that the twins
Pablo and Pedro Vicario are watching him, knives in hand. They have been waiting for him
since three in the morning, at Clotilde Armenta’s shop in the town square. She observes that
they look at him “more with pity” as he crosses the square (p. 15). They make a movement
towards Santiago but stop when Clotilde Armenta pleads with them to stop for the sake of the
bishop.
The people of the town are disappointed when the bishop’s boat doesn’t stop; he makes a
sign of the cross in the air to bless the crowds and passes. The crowds are left with the gifts of
turkeys, cocks, and wood that they have brought. Santiago is with his friend Cristo Bedoya, a
medical student, and Margot, the narrator’s sister, who invites him for breakfast at their
house. He promises to come over after he has changed his clothes but she insists that he come
right away. Cristo Bedoya recalls that morning and tells the narrator that he suspected that
Margot knew about the twins’ plan. But his impression is incorrect. It is only after the
bishop’s boat has passed by that the news of the scandal spreads. Margot gets to know only
after Santiago has left that Angela Vicario, who was married the day before to Bayardo
Román, has been brought back to her parents’ home. She goes home in tears.
Luisa Santiaga, the narrator’s mother, is Santiago’s godmother. On hearing the news
from Margot, she rushes to warn her friend Plácida Linero of the danger to her son but before
she can reach her house someone tells her that Santiago Nasar has been killed. The first
section ends at this point.
Observe how the narrative moves back and forth freely, mixing interviews with the
accounts of the narrator, who has returned to the town twenty-seven years after the murder, to
“put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards” (p. 5). The
memories of Santiago’s mother, the servants Victoria Guzmán and her daughter Divina Flor,

6
friend Cristo Bedoya, the narrator’s sister and other nameless minor characters are collected
for the narrator’s report. There is even a reference to the report of the magistrate who
investigated Santiago’s death.
Notice the carefully cultivated reportorial style; no doubt influenced by Márquez’s early
career as a journalist. Many of the techniques that he uses are trademarks of journalistic
writing. The direct quotations of the people connected to the tragedy, the attempts to appear
objective, and the meticulous documentation of details, are some of the characteristics of
Márquez’s style in the novel.
Answer the following questions in a few lines.
(i) What does Santiago dream about the night before he is killed?
(ii) Why doesn’t Victoria Guzmán warn Santiago about the twins’ plan to kill him?
(iii) Why don’t Pablo and Pedro Vicario kill Santiago when they see him cross the square?
(iv) What is the scandal that hits the town as soon as the bishop’s boat passes by?

Part II: Page 24-47

Whereas the first section was about documenting people’s memories about the day Santiago
was killed, the time frame of the novel undergoes a major shift and this section goes back six
months before the killing; to the arrival of Bayardo San Román in the town and the
subsequent flutter that is caused. The narrator’s mother has told him all this in her letters to
him at school. Bayardo immediately attracts the attention of the townspeople with his well-
toned body, good looks, expensive clothes, and stylized manner. People are overawed by his
skill at almost every conceivable activity; whether it is swimming or using the telegraph. He
tells everyone he’s an engineer and speaks with authority on matters ranging from tropical
illnesses to the need for a railroad in the town. More than anything else, he appears to be
immensely rich.
People wonder why he has come to this mislaid town and he replies that it is because he
is looking for somebody to marry. Bayardo himself creates this aura of mystery that
surrounds him. As the narrator observes, “he had a way of speaking that served him rather to
conceal than to reveal” (p. 25). One day he catches a glimpse of Angela and her mother as
they are walking by his boarding-house. In his characteristic, self assured manner he
announces his decision to marry her. As with many other incidents, the accounts of the
people are at variance:
Angela Vicario told me that the landlady of the boardinghouse had spoken to her
about that episode before Bayardo San Román began courting her. “I was quite
startled,” she told me. Three people who had been in the boardinghouse
confirmed that the episode had taken place, but four others weren’t sure. (p. 28)
Bayardo courts Angela in an extravagant fashion, winning over her family with his
display of wealth and power. They are poor people, as her father is a goldsmith who has gone
7
blind, and they depend on the twins’ work as butchers. Angela’s mother, Pura Vicario has
given her daughters a strict upbringing; they are skilled at embroidery, making lace, and
caring for family members.
Angela’s family is excited about Bayardo’s proposal but Pura Vicario insists that he
should identify himself properly. In response, Bayardo calls over his entire family. His father
is the illustrious General Petronio San Román, a civil war hero and his mother, a famed
beauty of her time. Their visit to the town, in all their finery and intimidating Ford car, is
enough to quell any doubts about Bayardo’s eligibility. The unexpected factor is Angela’s
objection that she doesn’t love Bayardo. Pura Vicario dismisses it with a practical solution,
“Love can be learned too” (p. 34). Angela tells the narrator;
“He seemed too much of a man for me,” she told me. Besides, Bayardo San
Román hadn’t even tried to court her, but had bewitched the family with his
charm. (p. 34)
Bayardo arranges for the wedding on a grandiose scale. He asks Angela which is the
prettiest house in town and decides to buy it but faces some resistance from its owner. Xius
the widower, refuses the exorbitant sum offered, with a gentle reprimand: “I’m sorry,
Bayardo,” the widower said, “but you young people don’t understand the motives of the
heart” (p. 36).
Three days later, Bayardo offers a sum that the poor widower cannot refuse. The narrator
gets all this information from Dr. Dionisio Iguarán, his mother’s cousin, who was present
with them at the clubhouse. Bayardo thinks that money can buy him anything. As the narrator
correctly presumes:
Bayardo San Román, for his part, must have got married with the illusion of
buying happiness with the huge weight of his power and fortune, for the more
the plans for the festival grew, the more delirious ideas occurred to him to
make it even larger. (p. 38)
Bayardo San Román goes overboard in his preparations for the wedding; ordering
expensive decorations, and food and drink for the entire town. In its own modest way, the
Vicario family also prepares for the wedding. They whitewash their house and pigsty and
create a space for the festivities. The wedding becomes something of a public spectacle. The
most exorbitant gifts arrive for the couple; a convertible for Bayardo and gold cutlery for
Angela. Everyone is suitably impressed with Bayardo’s riches. Again, he displays a singular
lack of sensitivity by coming two hours late for his own wedding, causing some anxiety to
Angela, who refuses to wear her wedding dress till he arrives.
A sense of lurking tragedy is introduced with an unexpected revelation: “No one would
have thought nor did anyone know that Angela wasn’t a virgin” (p. 37). As the wedding
approaches Angela, as told to the narrator many years later, worries about Bayardo
discovering that she isn’t a virgin. She wants to tell her mother but two of her closest friends

8
dissuade her and teach her old wives’ tricks to fake her lost virginity. They advise her to stain
the bed sheet with Mercurochrome, a red coloured antiseptic, on her wedding night, so that
her husband is tricked into believing that she is a virgin. Following their advice, she decides
to remain silent.
The narrator, his brother Luis Enrique, Cristo Bedoya, and Santiago Nasar are good
friends who always hang out together. During the wedding festivities, none of them observe
anything implicating about Santiago’s conduct. Santiago spends most of his last hours with
his friends trying to calculate the exact cost of the wedding. He is obsessive, speculating
about the cost of each item; flowers, fireworks, and liquor.
After the wedding celebrations are over, the couple leave for their new home at ten but
many young men linger on in the streets. Pura Vicario goes to sleep after clearing up and is
woken up by the sound of slow knocking at her door. It is Bayardo with Angela. He leaves
his wife there and departs quietly. There are sufficient hints to indicate that he has discovered
that his wife is not a virgin and feeling humiliated, he has brought Angela back to her parents.
Realizing what has happened, Pura Vicario beats Angela till her face is bruised. The brothers
are summoned and they ask her to name her lover. Without any hesitation, Angela takes
Santiago’s name. Take note of the beautiful simile used (italics mine):
She looked for it in the shadows, she found it at first sight among the many,
many easily confused names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to
the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence
has always been written.
“Santiago Nasar,” she said. (p. 47)
It echoes the fatalism inherent in the title of the novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
This image is predictive; the Vicario twins pin Santiago to the door of his own house by
repeatedly stabbing him with their butcher knives. The narrator learns about these events in
the Vicario household from his mother, who got to know all this from Pura Vicario, Angela’s
mother.
This section of the novel familiarizes us with the traditions of this small Colombian
town, based on a medieval code of conduct for women; such as a cloistered upbringing,
repression of their sexuality, and arranged marriages. We can presume that the manner in
which Angela’s marriage is arranged is the norm; the woman’s preferences are not taken into
account. Men enjoy sexual freedom but women are punished if they have pre-marital sex.
Now answer these questions in a few lines.
(i) Bayardo San Román has been called “a character straight out of the pages of romantic
fiction.” Do you agree with this assessment? Give reasons for your answer.
(ii) Where do Bayardo and Angela meet for the first time? What happens there?
(iii) What keeps Santiago pre-occupied throughout the wedding festivities?
(iv) What does Pura Vicario do after Bayardo brings her daughter back?

9
Part III: Page 48-71
Again, there is a change in the time frame of the narrative, that shifts to events immediately
after Santiago is killed. Pablo and Pedro surrender to their church after killing Santiago
Nasar. They declare their innocence before God, as it was “a matter of honor” (p. 48). After
spending three years in jail, awaiting trial because their family is too poor to afford bail, their
plea of “homicide in legitimate defense of honor” is upheld by the court and they are
absolved (p. 48). Their acquittal is a comment on the outdated social beliefs and customs of
their society, which condones a brutal murder for the preservation of a hypocritical morality.
If the previous section gave an account of events that form the backdrop to Santiago’s
murder, this section focuses on the killers’ movements immediately before the killing, as told
to the narrator by Pablo and Pedro. After Angela takes Santiago Nasar’s name, the twins pick
up their best butchering knives and proceed to the meat-market to sharpen them. They tell
anyone who asks them that they are sharpening their knives to kill Santiago. Except Faustino
Santos, most of their butcher friends dismiss it as “drunkards’ baloney” (p. 52). He reports
the matter to a sergeant named Leandro Pornoy, who has come to buy liver for the mayor,
Colonel Aponte.
The twins look for Santiago Nasar at María Alejandrina Cervantes’ place. Not finding
him there, they wait for him at Clotilde Armenta’s shop, where they know that “almost
everybody would stop except Santiago Nasar” (p. 50). They tell everyone who comes to buy
milk that they are waiting to kill Santiago. By the time of the bishop’s arrival almost
everyone knows about the twins’ plan. Clotilde Armenta is the only one who observes that
the brothers were “not as anxious to fulfill the sentence as to find someone who would do
them the favor of stopping them” (p. 57). The twins tell the sergeant, Leandro Pornoy about
their plan when he comes to buy milk. When the mayor hears about it from the sergeant, he
isn’t unduly worried but when his wife gives him news of Angela’s return to her parents, he
rushes to Clotilde Armenta’s shop. He takes away their knives and sends them back home.
He is convinced that they were “nothing but a pair of big bluffers” (p. 56). Clotilde Armenta
is the only one who thinks that the danger is not over:
They left. Clotilde Armenta suffered another disappointment with the mayor’s
casual attitude, because she thought he should have arrested the twins until the
truth came out. Colonel Aponte showed her the knives as a final argument.
“Now they haven’t got anything to kill anybody with,” he said.
“That’s not why,” said Clotilde Armenta. “It’s to spare those poor boys from
the horrible duty that’s fallen on them.” (p. 57)
At this point, the narrator briefly describes the twins. Pablo, the elder one is more
imaginative whereas Pedro, the younger one, is sentimental. Pedro has served in the army for
eleven months and returned with a bullet wound and a urinary disorder. It is Pedro who
decides that Santiago Nasar should be killed but when the mayor takes away their knives, he

10
considers his obligations over. Then Pablo takes over and they return to their pigsty to get
another set of knives. Pedro has an attack of pain and remains outside. His brother suspects
that this delay is deliberate and drags him along. On their way back to the shop they stop for
coffee at the house of Prudencia Cotes, Pablo’s fiancée. Then it is Pedro’s turn to suspect his
brother of wavering in his purpose.
After they have picked up their second set of knives, the twins go back to the meat
market to sharpen their knives. Again, they announce their decision to kill Santiago and
again, none of their butcher friends takes them seriously. They return to Clotilde Armenta’s
shop to wait for Santiago. She is the only one who, anxious to do everything she can, sends a
message to Father Amador and to Victoria Guzmán. She gives the Vicario twins the strongest
liquor in her shop, in the hope that they will get too drunk to kill anyone.
Father Amador is preoccupied with the preparations for the bishop’s visit. However, in a
later interview to the narrator, he reveals that he received Clotilde Armenta’s messages but
did not want to interfere in the matter, thinking it was “something for the civil authorities” (p.
70).
The narrator recalls that, after the wedding celebrations were over, they went to the
House of Mercies, the local brothel. We learn that, at the age of fifteen, Santiago had a
passionate affair with the proprietress, María Alejandrina Cervantes; the woman responsible
for taking the virginity of an entire generation of young men in the town. It is clear that the
brothel is openly frequented by almost all the young men in the town. Compare their conduct
to Angela Vicario’s fears about her wedding-night.
After leaving María Alejandrina’s place, the friends go to sing bawdy songs for the
newly wed couple. They are not aware that Bayardo is, at that moment, alone in the darkened
farm house. Presuming that the house is empty, the friends disperse. Santiago Nasar goes
home to sleep and Cristo Bedoya to his grandparents. The narrator secretly returns to María
Alejandrina’s brothel and his brother goes home. At Clotilde Armenta’s shop, the twins
inform Luis Enrique about their intention, but he is far too drunk to grasp anything and goes
home. He falls into a deep slumber in his bathroom and is woken by the sound of his sister,
the nun, shouting that Santiago Nasar has been killed.
This section of Chronicle of a Death Foretold illustrates the operational mechanisms of
the outdated notions of chastity and honour in this small town. Before Santiago Nasar is
killed almost everybody knows about the twins’ plan, yet no one does anything to stop them.
Most of the people, such as the mayor and the butcher friends of the twins, dismiss it as the
false bravado of drunkards. At the same time, the factors of class and racial prejudice can also
be glimpsed in the conduct of the people. There are some, such as Clotilde Armenta’s
husband, who think that the twins would never dare to touch a man from a higher class:
“Don’t be silly,” he told her. “Those two aren’t about to kill anybody, much less someone
rich” (p. 55).

11
 Others, like the priest, Father Amador, don’t act out of sheer passivity, whereas Victoria
Guzmán’s silence arises out of hatred for Santiago Nasar; “in the depths of her heart she
wanted them to kill him” (p. 11). When the twins are at Prudencia Cotes’ house for coffee,
both she and her mother approve of their decision, observing that it is a matter of honour (p.
63). Clotilde Armenta is the only one who correctly perceives the twins’ state of mind and
realizes the danger to Santiago. She does all she can to prevent the killing.
The important thing to note in this section is the Vicario twins’ behavior before they kill
Santiago; they announce their intention to countless people but no one prevents them from
killing him. It is Márquez’s way of exposing the weakness of the honour code; a code that
demands that the Vicario twins kill the man who has supposedly dishonoured their sister.
They do not have the moral courage of their sister who refuses to follow social dictates.
Márquez said that killing for the sake of honour was pretty much commonplace in his country
but what intrigued him as a writer was the fact that the killers had tried their best to get
someone to stop them.
Now, answer these questions in a few lines.
(i) Where do the twins surrender after killing Santiago Nasar? Why?
(ii) Why does the narrator return to María Alejandrina’s house in secret?
(iii) What steps does Clotilde Armenta take to prevent the murder?
(iv) What do the twins do after the mayor, Colonel Aponte takes away their knives?

Part IV: Page 72-96

The narrative shifts to events subsequent to Santiago’s murder. The mayor, not aware of the
steps to be taken in such a situation, immediately orders an autopsy. As the only doctor in
town, Dr. Dionisio Iguarán, is away, the priest Father Amador is ordered to conduct it as he
was a medical student before he became a priest. Moreover, there is no human-sized
refrigerator to keep Santiago’s body, which has begun to decay (p. 73). Against this backdrop
of underdevelopment, the autopsy is carried out with primitive craftsmen’s tools. It is like a
“massacre,” doing further damage to the corpse (p. 75).
Notice the image of the dogs attacking the dying Santiago and Divina Flor keeping them
at bay (p. 73). Does this scene remind you of the one where Victoria Guzmán is
disemboweling the rabbits for lunch and feeding the guts to the dogs? (p. 8) The resemblance
is unmistakable.
The narrator quotes from the autopsy report in detail, providing the reader with facts that
could be of interest only to a forensic expert. The almost two-page long description is
disturbing. Why does the author give us all the gory details of the autopsy? What purpose
does it serve?

12
 After the autopsy, Santiago Nasar is buried quickly and the narrator goes to María
Alejandrina Cervantes for solace. But she sends him away, saying he smells of Santiago. In
jail, even the twins are troubled by the stubborn smell of Santiago:
At that moment they were comforted by the honor of having done their duty, and
the only thing that worried them was the persistence of the smell. (p. 78)
The smell of Santiago that refuses to be washed away, the insomnia of Pedro that doesn’t
let him sleep for eleven months, Pablo Vicario’s attack of dysentery, and Pedro Vicario’s
painful urinary infection: all these psychosomatic symptoms are expressions of their
suppressed guilt. Though the court upholds the “thesis of homicide in legitimate defense of
honor” and the twins declare that they “would have done it again a thousand times over for
the same reason,” it would not be incorrect to presume that their consciences are troubled (p.
79). This manifests itself in the form of these physical disorders when they are in jail.
The Vicario twins get paranoid, imagining a retributive attack from the community of
Arab settlers, to which Santiago Nasar belonged. However, when the mayor goes to
investigate, he notices nothing to worry about from the Arabs who are “clannish, hard-
working, and Catholic” (p. 81). In fact, it is Susana Abdala, a matriarch from the Arab
community, who cures the twins of their ailments with her folk remedies. In any case, the
twins are transferred to the jail at Riohacha. They have to spend three years in jail because
they are too poor to afford bail while waiting for the trial to be over. After they are released,
Pablo goes on to become a goldsmith and marries Prudencia Cotes whereas Pedro re-enlists
in the army and disappears during a foray into guerilla territory.
At this point you will notice that the narrative has suddenly picked up pace and the
narrator gives us a quick, synoptic account of the eventual fate of the survivors of the tragedy.
Events covering many years are compressed into a few sentences. Compare this to the
description of the autopsy in minute, nauseating detail.
Angela leaves the town with her family to go and live in Manaure, a remote village by
the sea. The father Poncio Vicario dies soon after, as his “moral pain carried him off” (p. 83).
People soon forget about Bayardo after Santiago’s murder. Five days later, the widower Xius
sees a phosphorescent bird fluttering over his former home and informs the mayor, who
suddenly realizes that Bayardo must still be inside. He finds him sick in his farmhouse.
Bayardo’s family is summoned and, after an exaggerated display of grief by his sisters and
aunts, he is carried away in a hammock. Over the years, the widower Xius’s farmhouse falls
into decay and everything within disappears. The narrator mentions how his attempt to
interview Bayardo twenty-three years later is rebuffed. He refuses to divulge information of
even the most insignificant kind.
The townspeople rationalize the brutal killing of Santiago without any trace of guilt:

13
 Santiago Nasar had expiated the insult, the brothers Vicario had proved their
status as men, and the seduced sister was in possession of her honor once more.
(p. 84)
It is an ironic comment on the collective consciousness of the community depicted in the
novel. Pay special attention to the words: ‘insult,’ ‘men,’ and ‘honor.’ What is their
significance?
The narrator periodically receives news of Angela Vicario from his sisters who visit her.
Twenty-three years after the tragedy he gets an opportunity to meet her, during the course of
his work as a travelling salesman. He finds her a changed woman; with grey hair,
bespectacled, and passing her days embroidering. Though Angela is forthcoming about all the
details of her wedding night, she dismisses the narrator’s probing about the identity of her
real lover with a single sentence; “Don’t beat it to death, cousin,” she told me. “He was the
one” (p. 91). However, nobody believes it was Santiago because they belonged to such
diverse backgrounds.
At this point in the novel, part of the mystery surrounding the events that took place at
Bayardo’s farmhouse on his wedding night is cleared up. Angela tells the narrator that,
following her friends’ advice, she carried all the items necessary to fake her lost virginity but
at the crucial moment she decided against it:
“I didn’t do any of what they told me,” she said, “because the more I thought
about it, the more I realized that it was all something dirty that shouldn’t be
done to anybody, much less to the poor man who had the bad luck to marry
me.” (p. 92)
Angela shares a secret that she hasn’t told anyone before; she confesses that she began to
fall in love with Bayardo the moment her mother started to beat her. Angela married Bayardo
because her family did not want her to refuse this “prize of destiny,” not because she loved
him (p. 34). When Bayardo brings her back to her family, feeling humiliated because he has
discovered that his wife isn’t a virgin, she realizes that beneath the confident exterior he is
human and subject to prejudices. Angela understands that he is not as perfect as he projects
himself to be. This is, perhaps, what makes Angela fall in love with him.A few years after her
departure from the town she catches a glimpse of Bayardo outside a hotel in Riohacha. This
ignites a strange passion and, a few days later, she pours out her feelings to him in a letter.
There is no reply but this does not discourage her from writing to him almost every week.
She expresses her love to him, without any inhibitions or shame.
This continues for seventeen years, in spite of the fact that she doesn’t get a single reply
from Bayardo San Román. She writes to him when her mother has gone to sleep and takes the
help of her seamstress friends to post the letters. One day she hears footsteps and Bayardo is
at the door. Old, fat, shortsighted, and balding; the “diminished” Bayardo San Román, who
has come back to his wife, has nothing in common with the Bayardo who charmed almost an

14
entire town twenty-three years earlier (p. 96). He returns with two bags full of Angela’s
unopened letters.
Bayardo’s return marks the happy ending to the romantic story of Angela and Bayardo,
in an otherwise tragic novel. Bayardo’s return is a vindication of Angela’s decision. Though
she has suffered immense humiliation and isolation, Bayardo comes back to her. It seems that
Bayardo has not opened Angela’s letters as he must have guessed their content and intent
and, maybe, his pride or his guilt prevented him from reading them. Angela’s love for
Bayardo proves stronger than his prejudices.
Answer these questions briefly.
(i) Why is the autopsy of Santiago outlined in such detail?
(ii) Describe the condition of Pablo and Pedro in jail?
(iii) Why do Angela’s feelings towards her husband change after he has forsaken her?
(iv) Why, in your opinion, does Bayardo return to his wife?

Part V: Page 97-122

Santiago’s death has a disturbing effect on the collective consciousness of the entire town.
People are anxious to discern an order in the “chain of many chance events” that led to the
killing (p. 97). They take refuge in a simple fatalism, believing that “none of us could go on
living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate” (p.
97). Note that the narrator uses the collective pronoun ‘we.’ Like the other people in the
town, he rationalizes Santiago’s murder, concluding that it was fate at work. Plácida Linero,
who made the tragic error of closing the main door of her house seconds before Santiago
reached it, blames herself for misinterpreting Santiago’s dream of birds. Those who failed to
act and prevent the crime “consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are
sacred monopolies with access only for those who are part of the drama” (p. 98). They
absolve themselves of guilt by reference to the social code of honour.
Read pages 98-99 very carefully. After Santiago’s murder, the town is “like an open
wound” with crowds pouring in to give testimonies. The killing affects even those people
who are only remotely associated with the murder: “Hortensia Baute, whose only
participation was having seen two bloody knives that weren’t bloody yet, felt so affected by
the hallucination that she fell into a penitential crisis and one day, unable to take it any
longer, she ran out naked in the street” (p. 98).
The narrator manages to locate 322 pages of the original 500-page brief prepared by the
investigating magistrate, who appears to be a man well versed in literary texts and
undermines his legal document with notes in the margin that verge on the lyrical. The
magistrate is “perplexed by the enigma that chance had touched him with” (p. 99). Although
there is no evidence to support her contention, Angela swears that Santiago was the one who
seduced her. When questioned by the magistrate, she is unable to provide any facts to

15
corroborate her charge that Santiago was her secret lover; details like where or how it
happened. Even her closest friends are unaware of the identity of the real person responsible
for deflowering her. Like everybody else, the magistrate shows a singular lack of insight,
interpreting Santiago’s death as the “untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold”
(p. 100).
The general opinion is that Santiago’s conduct, especially in the hours before his death,
seemed to be that of an innocent man. He appeared to be genuinely perplexed when he finally
learnt from Nahir Miguel that the Vicario brothers were waiting to kill him. The narrator is
also convinced that Santiago died “without understanding his death” (p. 102).
The narrator goes back to the moment when Santiago Nasar, Cristo Bedoya, and Margot
were waiting for the bishop at the docks. When he doesn’t disembark from the boat, they are
disappointed and disperse. Santiago promises to visit Margot’s house after changing his
clothes. As he is walking through the market square with Cristo Bedoya, Yamil Shaium, an
Arab shopkeeper, beckons the latter to learn the truth about the rumours he has heard. As
soon as Yamil Shaium tells Cristo about the twins’ plan he runs after Santiago, who has left
by then. He goes and searches for Santiago at his house, unaware that he has gone to his meet
his fiancée, Flora Miguel.
Picking up Santiago’s revolver, unaware that it is empty, Cristo Bedoya rushes to look
for him at the narrator’s house. He is held up on the way by a patient who needs his
assistance. As he is running towards the narrator’s house he sees Luisa Santiaga, who is
weeping for the dead Santiago.
While Cristo Bedoya was looking for Santiago Nasar, the latter had gone to meet his
fiancée. Flora Miguel has heard the news about Angela and returns Santiago’s letters to him,
before locking herself in her room. Her father Nahir Miguel tells the baffled Santiago about
the Vicario twins’ plan. Santiago ignores his offer of a rifle and leaves. Crowds have already
gathered at the market square as if in anticipation of the killing and by this time Santiago has
started running towards the front door of his house. Plácida Linero has learnt, just five
minutes earlier, that the Vicario twins are waiting to kill her son. When Divina Flor informs
her that she has seen Santiago go upstairs, she orders the front door to be locked. Just when
Santiago is a few yards away from his house, the door shuts on him.
Santiago faces his killers. Each thrust of their butcher knives is described, without any
attempt to dilute the violence;
“The strange thing is that the knife kept coming out clean,” Pedro Vicario
declared to the investigator. “I’d given it to him at least three times and there
wasn’t a drop of blood.” (p. 119-20)
A fatally wounded Santiago gets up and walks through a neighbour’s house to reach the
back door of his own. The scene has a near surrealist feel to it, described like a film scene in
slow motion. Márquez wrote many film scripts and this explains the literary parallel of the

16
cinematic technique where the moment on screen is stretched by decreasing the speed of the
camera.
The horror of Santiago’s death is magnified by the echo of other images in the narrative.
Recall the beginning of the novel, where the narrator casually mentions that Santiago was
“carved up like a pig” or the image of Victoria Guzmán disemboweling the rabbits and
feeding the intestines to the dogs (p. 2). There is also the simile of a butterfly pinned to the
wall, that foreshadows Santiago being pinned to the door of his house by the knives of the
Vicario brothers. The novel ends with the haunting image of Santiago walking with his
intestines held in his hands and collapsing on the floor of the kitchen.
Answer the following questions.
(i) How does Santiago’s death affect the town?
(ii) What are the observations of the investigating magistrate about the murder?
(iii) Where was the narrator when Santiago was being killed?
(iv) Why does Santiago Nasar smile when he finally faces his killers?

4. Critical Analysis
This section will introduce you to those aspects of the novel, which have engaged critics
since its publication. After reading this part of the study material you should be able to,
 identify the innovative features of Márquez’s narrative style;
 comment upon the form or structure of the novel;
 discuss the exposé of ‘machismo’ in the novel; and
 appreciate Márquez’s contribution to Latin American literature.
4.1 Narrative Style in Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Remember that the narrator is not to be confused with the author Gabriel García Márquez.
The narrator is a construct of the author, as much a subject of his ironic treatment as the other
characters in the novel. The author and the narrator are distinct and separate.
The novel begins when the unnamed narrator visits his home twenty-seven years after
the murder of his friend Santiago Nasar. He is now an investigative reporter, who has
returned to his native town to interview the people connected with the provincial drama. His
intention in writing this chronicle is “to put the broken mirror of memory back from so many
scattered shards” (p. 5).
Márquez borrows many customary tricks of the journalistic trade. His style is no doubt
influenced by his early career as a journalist and it is easy to understand why Raymond
Williams felt that Chronicle of a Death Foretold “showcased García Márquez the journalist”
(p. 132). The most frequently used stylistic device in the novel is of direct quotation, as in
these passages:

17
 “He was always dreaming about trees,” Plácida Linero, his mother, told me
twenty-seven years later, recalling the details of that unpleasant Monday. (p. 1)
“No matter how much I scrubbed with soap and rags I couldn’t get rid of the
smell,” Pedro Vicario told me. (p. 79)
Raymond Williams has painstakingly counted the total number of direct quotes, character-
wise;
Reviewing these individuals cited directly by the narrator, one can note a total of
thirty-seven characters who contribute to this “chronicle” of the narrator-
investigator. The characters who are most quoted, as sources of information are, in
descending order, the following: Angela Vicario (directly quoted twelve times),
Cristo Bedoya (nine times), Pablo Vicario (seven times), and Margot (seven
times). The narrator-investigator’s total “record” for his chronicle consists of nine
citations from the written record and a total of 102 quotations from the thirty-seven
characters. (p. 136)
In addition to such a large number of direct quotations, there is a large amount of
paraphrasing and summarizing. Parts of official documents, such as Santiago’s autopsy report
and the investigating magistrate’s report are also included.
Márquez wanted his novel to have the precise structure of a detective story. Read the first
line of the novel. In keeping with his reportorial style, the narrator marks each movement of
Santiago on the day of his murder by recording the exact time;
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. (p. 1)
The public spree broke up into fragments around midnight, and all that remained
was Clotilde Armenta’s establishment on one side of the square. Santiago Nasar
and I, with my brother Luis Enrique and Cristo Bedoya, went to María
Alejandrina Cervantes’ house of mercies. Among so many others, the Vicario
brothers went there and they were drinking with us and singing with Santiago
Nasar five hours before killing him. (p. 45)
The narrator mimics the strategy employed by detectives, while trying to reconstruct a
crime. Another feature of the narrative style is careful documentation of detail to convey the
impression of a meticulously researched investigation;
After their sister revealed the name to them, the Vicario twins went to the bin in
the pigsty where they kept their sacrificial tools and picked out the two best
knives; one for quartering, ten inches long by two and a half inches wide, and the
other for trimming, seven inches long by one and a half inches wide. (p. 50-51)

18
 In another passage, there are detailed descriptions of the gifts brought by the illustrious
guests for the wedding of Angela and Bayardo. They illustrate the exalted status enjoyed by
Bayardo and his family. Does the careful documentation of such facts help the narrator
decipher Santiago’s death? At times, the narrator takes his responsibility to record everything
too seriously, leading to an overabundance of irrelevant details, as in this passage;
Colonel Lázaro Aponte had got up just a little before four. He’d finished shaving
when Officer Leandro Pornoy revealed the Vicario brothers’ intentions to him . . .
He got dressed calmly, tied his bow tie several times until he had it perfect, and
around his neck he hung the scapular of the Congregation of Mary, to receive the
bishop. (p. 55-56)
Although the narrator declares that he is investigating a murder, he includes numerous
bits of information that serve other purposes but do not contribute to the investigation.
Another good example is the disturbing description of Santiago’s dead body. The senseless
brutality of Santiago’s murder is underlined by the naturalistic autopsy report.
Remember that the journalistic style is carefully cultivated by Márquez only to expose its
utter inadequacy as a method to understand Santiago’s death. A careful reading throws up
many elements in the novel that run counter to the spirit of objective reporting. The narrator
forgets the first important lesson of objectivity and incorporates the subjective impressions of
the characters. His personal observations are also recorded. When he eventually meets
Bayardo San Román, about whom he has read in his mother’s letters, he writes;
I met him a short while after she did, when I came home for Christmas vacation,
and I found him just as strange as they had said. He seemed attractive, indeed,
but far from Magdalena Oliver’s idyllic vision. He seemed more serious to me
than his antics would have led one to believe, and with a hidden tension that was
barely concealed by his excessive good manners. But above all, he seemed like a
very sad man to me. (p. 27)
Many times, the subjectivity verges on the surreal. When Santiago Nasar crosses the
square on his way to the docks to welcome the bishop, he is dressed in white clothes:
Clotilde Armenta, the proprietress of the establishment, was the first to see him
in the glow of dawn, and she had the impression that he was dressed in
aluminum. “He already looked like a ghost,” she told me. (p. 13)
The hallucinatory is also incorporated into the narrator’s account, as when Hortensia
Baute sees the knives of the twins’ “dripping blood” even before they have killed Santiago (p.
62). Divina Flor insists that she saw Santiago enter his house and go upstairs when he was in
fact out in the street, saying “it was a very clear vision” (p. 99). There is no suggestion of any
skepticism or condescension on the narrator’s part when he reports these experiences. Folk
beliefs, superstitions, dreams, and omens are included in the narrator’s account with the same

19
seriousness accorded to normal occurrences. Paranormal happenings are reported without
incredulity. For instance, after Bayardo is carried away in a hammock, the empty farmhouse
falls into decay. All the valuable objects in it start disappearing, including a most unlikely
wardrobe that was assembled in the farmhouse. The narrator writes about them as if they are
normal occurences.
Gossip and rumour form an essential part of the narrative; unlikely components of an
investigative report. Bayardo’s arrival in the town generates the wildest possible kind of
rumours about his past:
It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as
troop commander, that he had escaped from Devil’s Island, that he’d been seen
in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he’d
salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward
Channel. (p. 32)
This misplaced attention to details is matched by a serious inability to determine the real
cause of the brutal killing. The narrator does not reflect on the tragedy of Santiago’s death for
a crime that he, in all likelihood, did not commit. Instead, everyone speculates about the real
identity of Angela’s lover, as nobody believes that it could be Santiago:
The most current version, perhaps because it was the most perverse, was that
Angela Vicario was protecting someone who really loved her and she had chosen
Santiago Nasar’s name because she thought that her brothers would never really
dare go up against him. (p. 91)
Although there is overwhelming evidence that Santiago could not have been the one who
took Angela Vicario’s virginity, everyone believes that he got killed because he was fated to
die. The narrator too concludes that the murder was a pre-destined event, a death “foretold”
(p. 100). What sets out as an investigation ends with an explanation that is illogical and
unscientific. He fails to understand the real cause behind the senseless murder of Santiago.
Attributing Santiago’s death to fate absolves everyone of guilt; the guilt of not having
fulfilled their responsibility to prevent the crime.
4.2 The Structure of the Novel
Some of the most familiar conventions governing the traditional novel are; events presented
in chronological sequence, an omniscient third-person narrator, and unity of point of view.
However, Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not follow any of these. The structure of
this novel defies all established principles of structural organization. Read this observation by
Bell (2001):
Indeed, Márquez has allowed his narrator to divide the action into five sections
suggestive of the five acts of a drama. Of course, the five sections do not
directly mimic the theatrical structure but then neither do they simply unfold

20
 the experience in a conventionally chronological way. Their spatialised
retrospect combines the concentration of dramatic structure with the digressive
spirit of narrative as the narrator continues to circle around the central enigma.
As in Hundred Years, the first chapter and the first sentence, give a synoptic
statement of the whole. The subsequent chapters then circle in different ways
around the same action, adding layers to our understanding. (p. 204)
The narrative does not proceed in a chronological manner. The five sections are not
numbered and the novel moves back and forth in time, creating the illusion of spontaneity
and authenticity.
The pace of the novel is uneven. Sometimes, events spread over many years are
summarized in a few lines, as when the narrator tells us about what happened to the Vicario
brothers after they were absolved of the murder (p. 83). On other occasions, the moment is
extended and described almost as if in slow motion. Read this passage from the end of the
novel:
Mortally wounded three times, Santiago Nasar turned frontward again and
leaned his back against his mother’s door, without the slightest resistance, as
if he only wanted to help them finish killing him by equal shares. “He didn’t
cry out again,” Pedro Vicario told the investigator. “Just the opposite: it
looked to me as if he was laughing,” Then they both kept on knifing him with
alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on
the other side of fear. (p. 120)
Márquez’s use of this cinematic technique can be traced to his passion for cinema. In
addition to his work as a journalist, he was a film critic, wrote many screenplays and, at one
time, even aspired to be a director.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold begins from a point where other novels generally end.
The killing of Santiago is the point of departure for the investigations. The whole town is
shown trying to understand why Santiago is killed, in spite of the fact that the killers didn’t
want to commit the crime and tried their best to make somebody stop them. At the time of
Santiago’s death, almost the entire town knows about the impending tragedy. The crowds
waiting to receive the bishop are aware of it, as are Prudencia Cotes and Victoria Guzmán.
The priest and the mayor, representatives of religious and state authority, fail to grasp the
seriousness of the situation. Though they are warned beforehand they don’t act in a decisive
manner. Their conduct is symptomatic of the failure of the church and the state to mediate
and contain the needless violence in their community. After Santiago is killed, the
townspeople rationalize his death:
But most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and still
didn’t do it consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred
monopolies with access only for those who are part of the drama. (p. 98)

21
 There is irony in the attempts to understand the murder as the culmination of a series of
fatal coincidences. The narrator is part of the collective attempt to read Santiago’s death as
the inescapable working of an impersonal fate:
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 the mission
assigned to us by fate. (p. 97)
The key words in these passages are: ‘chance,’ ‘fate,’ ‘coincidences,’ and ‘foretold.’ The
fatalism recurs like a refrain throughout the novel; as in the notations, which the investigating
magistrate makes on the margin of his brief:
Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many
coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled
fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold. (p. 100)
With their blinkered vision, the townspeople don’t understand that it is their outdated
sexual morality that is the real cause of the tragedy; a code of conduct that is prohibitive for
women only. Note that both Pablo and Pedro Vicario, like all the other young men of this
small town, visit María Alejandrina Cervantes’ House of Mercies but they are convinced that
Angela has tarnished their family honour by having a lover before marriage.
At the narrative level, Chronicle of a Death Foretold remains an unsolved enigma. The
novel does not allow the reader the catharsis that comes from resolution. The failure of the
narrator to finally ‘understand’ Santiago Nasar’s death is an indicator of the community’s
failure to break out of their repressive norms. The narrator and the entire town explain
Santiago’s death as a tragedy foretold. They are blind to the root cause of the tragedy; they
fail to see that Santiago’s life is sacrificed for the preservation of a hollow code of honour.
The absence of an omniscient narrator in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is another
structural innovation. Márquez does not provide us with access to the inner lives of his
characters. The narrator presents us with the numerous individual versions, which are full of
contradictions, confusions, and half-truths. He has to depend on the memories of other people
as he was not present at the scene of the crime. He was with Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, in
a drunken stupor, and got to know about Santiago’s death only when Father Amador started
to ring the church bells in alarm (p. 69).
For instance, when the narrator interviews Victoria Guzmán and Divina Flor, they deny
knowing that Pablo and Pedro Vicario were waiting to kill Santiago. Later, in another
interview, Victoria Guzmán admits that she got information of the twins’ plan from a beggar
woman;
“I didn’t warn him because I thought it was drunkard’s talk,” she told me.
Nevertheless, Divina Flor confessed to me on a later visit, after her mother had

22
 since died, that the latter hadn’t said anything to Santiago Nasar because in the
depths of her heart she wanted them to kill him. (p. 11)
Characters ascribe motives where none exist and make incorrect inferences. On the
morning of the bishop’s visit, Margot invites Santiago to have breakfast at her house. Cristo
Bedoya suspects her of knowing beforehand about the danger to Santiago’s life. But Margot
did not know about the twins’ plan till later. By that time, Santiago had left for his house to
change his clothes. When Clotilde Armenta sees Father Amador pass by her place on his way
to receive the bishop, she thinks that he hasn’t received any of her urgent messages:
“I thought he hadn’t got my message,” she said. Nevertheless, Father Amador
confessed to me many years later, retired from the world in the gloomy Calafell
Rest Home, that he had in fact received Clotilde Armenta’s message and others
more peremptory while he was getting ready to go to the docks.” The truth is I
didn’t know what to do,” he told me. “My first thought was that it wasn’t any
business of mine but something for the civil authorities . . .” (p. 70)
Angela Vicario identifies Santiago Nasar as her lover but, throughout the novel, doubts
are raised about the reliability of her claims. The narrator himself is not a reliable witness. He
asserts that;
I was with him [Santiago] all the time in the Church and at the festival, along
with Cristo Bedoya and my brother Luis Enrique, and none of us caught a
glimpse of any change in his manner. I’ve had to repeat this many times, because
the four of us had grown up together in school, and nobody could have believed
that we could have a secret without its being shared, all the more so such a big
secret. (p. 41)
But the narrator’s statement cannot be accepted unquestioningly. Later on in the novel
we learn that the narrator had a clandestine sexual liaison with María Alejandrina. This was
kept a secret from Santiago Nasar, as the narrator didn’t want to wound his friend’s
sensibilities (p. 66). Consider how the narrator repeatedly undermines his own authority
through such revelations.
The novel does not provide us with the comforting coherence of a single point of view.
One way in which a multiplicity of perspectives is presented is the mix of categories.
Interviews, letters, memoirs, reports, and magisterial briefs; as well as omens, dreams,
superstitions, and gossip: all are used to create a complex narrative structure, which does not
depend on a single, dominant point of view. The narrator does not try to moderate the
different, sometimes contradictory and sometimes conflicting versions in the narrative. He
does not judge or offer his opinions about the different people he talks to.
The traditional novel functions on the assurance that the reader can interpret the text in
the same way as the real world. Descriptive details are included to produce an illusion of

23
reality. Chronicle of a Death, on the other hand, includes self-conscious references to the
echoes of literature in the ‘real’ life that the novel claims to represent;
No one could understand such fatal coincidences. The investigating judge
who came from Riohacha must have sensed them without daring to admit it,
for his interest in giving them a rational explanation was obvious in the
report. The door to the square was cited several times with a dime-novel title:
“The Fatal Door.” (p. 11)
When the narrator goes to visit Angela Vicario in the remote village of Manuare, twenty-
three years after Santiago’s death, he finds her sitting by the window, embroidering by
machine. He immediately senses the resemblance to “bad literature” (p. 89). Note that the
killing of Santiago is always referred to as the “drama” or “tragedy.” The narrator obliquely
reminds us again and again that his account resembles literature; undermining the reality that
he claims to be chronicling.
4.3 The Critique of Machismo in Chronicle of a Death Foretold
In an interview with Mendoza, Márquez said that:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is certainly both an exposé and condemnation of
the basic machismo within our society - a society which is actually matriarchal.
(p. 108)
The dictionary explains machismo as ‘an exaggerated show of masculinity.’ Santiago
Nasar’s impressive collection of guns and rifles. Bayardo San Román’s challenge to the local
people to swim across the river, the bullet wound which Pedro flaunts, and the young men
singing bawdy songs in the streets; are all displays of their masculinity. When he was asked
what he understood by ‘machismo,’ Márquez replied that it is the “usurpation of other
people’s rights” (Mendoza, p. 108). In Chronicle of a Death Foretold the subjugation of
women is how machismo operates. Márquez castigates the machismo in his society through
Bayardo’s return to Angela, seventeen years after he left her at her parents’ home; through
the townspeople’s rationalization of Santiago’s death as a predestined event, and the Vicario
twins’ physiological ailments.
In this society, the burden of preserving morality lies on the women; they are trained to
put their domestic responsibilities above themselves. Angela’s mother, Purisima del Carmen
was a schoolteacher before she married but she has effaced herself so much that she “looks
like a nun” (p. 30). She raises her children in the most orthodox manner;
The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get
married. They knew how to do screen embroidery, sew by machine, weave bone
lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy, and write
engagement announcements. Unlike the girls of the time, who had neglected the

24
 cult of death, the four were past mistresses in the ancient science of sitting up
with the ill, comforting the dying, and enshrouding the dead. (p. 30)
The girls are expected to preserve their virginity for their husbands. The narrator’s
mother admires Pura Vicario’s daughters: “They’re perfect,” she was frequently heard to say.
“Any man will be happy with because they’ve been raised to suffer” (p. 31). Even after they
are engaged, whenever Bayardo meets Angela, it is under strict supervision.
It is not the men alone who perpetuate the subjugation of women. The women are also
active participants. When Bayardo brings Angela back to her parents’ home, it is Pura
Vicario who beats her daughter, even while her husband is sleeping in the next room, and
summons the twins. The next day she makes her daughter wear a red dress and takes her
away to a remote village. Pablo Vicario’s fiancée, Prudencia Cotes knows that he and his
brother are going to kill Santiago:
“I knew what they were up to,” she told me,” and I didn’t only agree, I never
would have married him if he hadn’t done what a man should do.” (p. 63)
But there are exceptions. Clotilde Armenta is one: the gutsy woman catches hold of
Pedro Vicario when he starts to move towards Santiago, but she is pushed away. The
narrator’s mother, Luisa Santiaga also rushes to warn her friend Plácida Linero of the danger
to her son, as soon as she hears that Bayardo has brought Angela back to her parents.
Whereas women are expected to be adept in domestic skills, male characters are
associated with the world of action. In addition to his collection of rifles, Santiago Nasar
possesses “falconry equipment” (p. 3). He breeds horses and from his father he has learned
“the manipulation of firearms, his love for horses, and the mastery of high-flying birds of
prey” (p. 6). His Arab origins and superior financial status set him apart and, if possible,
accentuate his maleness. Read Margot’s assessment of Santiago:
“I suddenly realized that there couldn’t have been a better catch than him,” she
told me. “Just imagine: handsome, a man of his word, and with a fortune of his
own at the age of twenty-one.” (p. 17)
However, like his father Ibrahim Nasar, he has no qualms about sexually abusing his
female servants, and doesn’t let go of any opportunity to handle Divina Flor, with his
“butcher hawk hand” (p. 12). He is selfish and immoral in his pursuit of sexual pleasure. The
narrator calls him a “chicken hawk,” who “went about alone, just like his father, nipping the
bird of any wayward virgin that would begin showing up in those woods” (p. 90).
Indifference characterizes his engagement to Flora Miguel, which is dictated by “the same
utilitarian concept of matrimony as his father” (p. 113). Ibrahim Nasar’s marriage to Plácida
Linero was unhappy and based on “convenience” (p. 3).
Like Santiago, Bayardo is also rich, good-looking, eligible, and insensitive. Bayardo
becomes the toast of the town soon after his arrival. People make wild conjectures about his
past as he has a way of speaking that “served him rather to conceal than to reveal” (p. 25).

25
Unlike her family, Angela Vicario is not charmed with Bayardo. She thinks that he is
“conceited” and “stuck-up” (p. 29). She resents the fact that Bayardo doesn’t try to court her
and is intimidated by Bayardo being “too much of a man” (p. 34). There are sufficient
indications that he is posturing as the perfect male. The narrator observes that there was a
“hidden tension” in his personality (p. 27).
The worldly Bayardo is aware that the decision to marry would be taken by Angela’s
family and he directs his charms towards them. Bayardo plans and executes his wedding in a
flamboyant fashion. He has enough money to invite the whole town to the wedding. Pay
attention to Santiago’s pre-occupation with the calculations of the exact amount that Bayardo
must have spent on his wedding. It keeps him absorbed in the hours before his death.
Notice that Angela disapproves of Santiago for asking Bayardo about the cost of the
wedding (p. 42). She displays a singular sensitivity that stands up in contrast to the crass
materialism of Bayardo. When Bayardo suggests that they get married by the bishop she
declines, as she “didn’t want to be blessed by a man who only cut off the combs for soup and
threw the rest of the rooster into the garbage” (p. 38). This sets her apart from the other
people who carry baskets full of fattened roosters as gifts for the bishop who doesn’t even
disembark to bless his subjects.
Angela Vicario
At every stage Angela Vicario goes against social dictates, though not in a visibly rebellious
way. Unlike everybody else, she is unimpressed by Bayardo and it is only because of
pressure from her family that she agrees to marry him. She worries because she’s not a virgin
and her two confidantes teach her “old wives’ tricks” to feign her lost virginity (p. 38). They
advise her to stain the bedsheet with Mercurochrome, a red-coloured antiseptic solution, so
that her husband is fooled into thinking that she’s a virgin;
She recounted how her friends had instructed her to get her husband drunk in bed
until he passed out, to feign more embarrassment than she really felt so he’d turn
out the light, to give herself a drastic douche of alum water to fake virginity, and
to stain the sheet with Mercurochrome so she could display it the following day
in her bridal courtyard. (p. 91)
Women in this small town have found a sly way around the strict code of conduct
imposed on them. This tactic for survival highlights the hollowness of an honour code that is
not followed in spirit, only outwardly. Angela initially agrees to the deception but, at the
critical moment, her basic decency does not allow her to deceive her husband.
When Bayardo takes Angela back to her parents’ home, her mother starts to beat her. By
a seemingly perverse logic she starts to fall in love with him at that moment. After Santiago’s
death her mother takes her away to live in a remote village, away from the scene of her
dishonour. A few years later, a chance glimpse of Bayardo in a hotel in Riohacha ignites a
strange passion in her. She writes a letter to him the same day. There is no reply but she

26
keeps writing to him for seventeen years; almost one letter every week. These assertions of
her will over that of a society that has condemned her to the life of an old maid have a
liberating effect. Though she writes the letters secretly at night, when her mother has gone to
sleep, she feels that she is finally “mistress of her fate” (p. 94). By re-establishing a
connection, through her letters, with her husband of a few hours, Angela Vicario asserts her
right to decide whom she will love.
Angela refuses to conform to society’s prescriptions for feminine behavior. Displaying
admirable honesty and courage, she refuses to pretend to be a virgin although she is aware of
the possible serious consequences of her decision. Her compassion allows her to forgive both
Bayardo and her mother for the punishment handed out to her. Bayardo’s return to Angela,
seventeen years after she starts writing to him, makes a mockery of the honour, to uphold
which, her brothers killed Santiago.
In the novel, it is never clearly established whether Santiago is guilty of deflowering
Angela Vicario. Nobody believes that Santiago and Angela could have had a relationship
because they belonged to different strata of society. Santiago always referred to Angela with
contempt; calling her “the ninny” or “the booby” (p. 31; p. 90). Angela’s singling out of
Santiago’s name is plausible if we assume that she is aware that he is a sexual predator and
she thinks that he deserves to die anyway. Yet he doesn’t become an object of pity because,
by a “larger logic,” he is guilty of abusing women (Bell, 194). Many people in the town
dislike him because of his wealth and arrogance.
Santiago becomes the victim of society’s false sense of honour and morality. The
autopsy report has the observation that a stab wound in the right hand “looked like a stigma
of the crucified Christ” (p. 76). The reference to the stigmata, the crucifixion wounds of
Christ, hint at Santiago’s status as a scapegoat.
Compare this to the common sentiment that there was only one victim in the whole
tragedy:
For the immense majority of people there was only one victim . . . The only one
who had lost everything was Bayardo San Román: “poor Bayardo” as he was
remembered over the years. (p. 84)
As for the question of the real identity of Angela’s lover, Márquez does not pursue the
mystery. This is not because the author wants it to remain “an unsolved enigma” but there is
an indication that the question is perhaps an invasion of a woman’s privacy. As Sangari
writes;
The unanswered question is not an invitation to further guesswork, but addresses
itself to whether the question itself is worth asking or is it necessary to answer,
whether the question itself is not the first in a series of violations of which the
murder is a culmination. (p. 120)

27
 The author’s refusal to pursue this riddle is an assertion of his solidarity with Angela.
Márquez implicitly critiques society’s skewed morality by refusing to satisfy the reader’s
curiosity about Angela’s real lover.
Pedro and Pablo Vicario
In real life, the brothers of the rejected wife Margarita Chica Silas killed Cayetano Gentile,
her lover. But in the novel, the brothers are twins. Do you think that this change served any
literary purpose? By profession the twins are butchers. The narrator directly asks their
butcher friends whether their trade did not make their souls “predisposed to killing a human
being” (p. 52). There is double irony at work here. This question pre-empts any attempt on
part of the reader to ascribe any symbolic significance to their profession. At the same time,
Santiago’s death is nothing short of butchery. The shadow of Victoria Guzmán pulling out
the intestines of the rabbits’ looms over the twins’ literal disemboweling of Santiago.
Pablo and Pedro Vicario betray their anxiety and nervousness in the disclosure of their
intentions to everyone they meet. In this patriarchal society, the duty of preserving the
family’s honour falls on the men. After their sister has named Santiago as her lover, they look
for him at a couple of unlikely places and then go to Clotilde Armenta’s shop “where they
knew that almost everyone would stop except Santiago Nasar” (p. 50). Clotilde Armenta is
the only one perceptive enough to sense that the twins are trying to evade “the horrible duty
that’s fallen on them” (p. 57). She notices how they look at Santiago with “pity” (p. 15). She
is not satisfied with the mayor’s simple action of taking away their knives and feels that it
would have been better if they were locked up. The twins’ wavering resolve is personified
through their dual identity:
Pedro Vicario, according to his own declaration, was the one who made the
decision to kill Santiago Nasar, and at first his brother only followed along. But
he was also the one who considered his duty fulfilled when the mayor disarmed
them, and then it was Pablo Vicario who assumed command. (p. 60-61)
When they return to their pigsty, Pedro remains outside to change the bandage for his
urinary infection whereas Pablo goes in to get another set of butchering knives. On their way
back they stop for coffee at Prudencia Cotes’ house: a highly improbable thing for potential
killers to do. Pedro’s manner is too insolent to be natural and, to Clotilde Armenta, he looked
“like a killer in the movies” (p. 64). It is obvious that they are posturing. After they kill
Santiago and surrender to the church, their attitude is defiant. They declare their innocence
“before God and before men” (p. 49). They refuse to cover their faces when they are
transferred to another jail at Riohacha. When the deed is over, they “feign a much more
inclement bloodthirstiness than really was true” (p. 49).
However, the façade that the Vicario twins have built up, crumbles when they are in jail.
Read the passages describing their condition (pp. 79-81). Is there any significance in the
smell of Santiago that they try to wash away? The insomnia that doesn’t let Pedro sleep for
eleven months and the attack of dysentery which Pablo has: would you agree that these are

28
manifestations of the guilt they carry in their sub-conscious mind? They imagine that the
Arab community, to which Santiago Nasar belonged, is out to kill them. But their paranoia is
unfounded. The condition of the twins raises doubts about their own convictions about the
honour, which they feel duty-bound to defend.
Bird imagery in the novel
Notice the frequency with which images of birds are used in relation to Santiago Nasar. The
narrator recalls how the fifteen-year-old Santiago had a passionate affair with María
Alejandrina Cervantes and his warning to him: “A falcon who chases a warlike crane can
only hope for a life of pain” (p. 65).
This line and the epigraph to the novel are from the same poem by Gil Vicente. The
narrator is cautioning Santiago about the peril involved in chasing a crane; here María
Alejandrina Cervantes. The night Santiago is killed, the narrator dreams of a nuthatch, a
small bird, when he is with María Alejandrina (p. 78). When Santiago Nasar finally learns
about the twins’ plan to kill him from Nahir Miguel, he appears like “a little wet bird” (p.
116). This image is significant because it is the custom in that part of the world to throw
water on birds before killing them. On the morning of his death, Santiago gets up with a
headache and tells his mother about the dream he has had, where he gets splattered with bird
droppings. Plácida Linero never forgives herself for misreading the bad omen. Divina Flor is
touched inappropriately by Santiago’s “butcher-hawk hand,” at every opportunity (p. 12). He
is a predator when it comes to women, he is a “chicken-hawk . . . nipping the bud of any
wayward virgin” (p. 90). The noise of the countless roosters that were brought as gifts for the
bishop forms the backdrop when Santiago is being butchered. These images are like moral
indicators for the reader.
In addition to these images associated with Santiago Nasar, there is the “phosphorescent
bird” fluttering over the widower Xius’s house after Santiago has been killed and Bayardo is
alone (p. 84). Xius is convinced that it is the soul of his deceased wife, Yolanda. When the
narrator sees Angela, twenty-three years after the event, she’s sitting by the window, with “a
canary that didn’t stop singing” in a cage hanging above her (p. 89). All these years, she has
kept herself occupied by making cloth flowers and paper birds but now that Bayardo has
come back to her, there’s a singing bird near her.
These references to birds form a cluster of images that link up with Gil Vicente’s poem
in the epigraph. They are a symbolic expression of Márquez’s disapproval of the male’s
pursuit of the female for sexual satisfaction. It is significant that the Portuguese poet Gil
Vicente was sympathetic to women and their suffering in his society.
4.4 Magical Realism
The German art critic Franz Roh first used the term ‘magic realism’ in 1925 to describe a
post-expressionist form that was emerging in literature and painting. The origin of the term
can be traced to the Surrealist movement in France. André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto
(1924) advocates an elimination of the boundaries between the conscious and subconscious;
29
between dream and reality. Surrealism’s most famous painters were Pierre Roy, René
Magritte, and Salvador Dalí. Throughout Latin America, Surrealism invoked an almost
instantaneous surge of fascination and sympathy. This is clearest in the case of vanguardist
Latin American poetry between 1920-40, most particularly that of Jorge Luis Borges, César
Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda, the most famous poet of Surrealism.
The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, in the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of this
World (1949) talks about maravilloso which is not a literary contrivance but issues out of “a
reality followed strictly in all its details.” In the last sentence of the prologue, he writes: “For
what is the history of Latin America but a chronicle of magic realism.” In his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech in 1967, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias spoke of the
novel in his continent as “the vehicle of ideas, an interpreter of peoples using as instrument a
language with a literary dimension, with imponderable magical value and profound human
projection.” In 1955, Angel Flores applied the term magical realism to Spanish American
writing. Flores put forward Borges as the master and suggested Kafka as its European
equivalent. Its distinctive feature was identified as a mixing of the realistic with the fantastic;
the mythic with the magical:
What came to dominate the story and to leave a lasting impression was the view
of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic data. A poetic divination of reality.
Something, that for a lack of a better word, could be called Magical Realism.
The term quickly came to be appropriated by Anglo-American critics who applied the
term loosely to Latin American literatures, without differentiation. Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) is considered its most representative novel. Magical
realism thus came to be misinterpreted as a genre peculiar to Latin American and third-world
writers.
It is a term that should be applied with caution as Márquez himself resisted any attempt
to label his fiction as magical. Though academics have most frequently described magical
realism as a mix of the magic and the real, the two are not mutually exclusive categories for
Márquez. He said that; “Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most
extraordinary things.” He says that it was possible for him to write such novels “simply by
looking at reality, our reality, without the limitations which rationalists have tried to impose
on it.” (Mendoza, p. 60) In Márquez’s fiction the subjective, psychic realm is presented as
the normal, commonplace experience of everyday life.
Seemingly irrational events are narrated without incredulity and the narrator’s tone, in
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, remains impassive: this is the most characteristic feature of
magic realism. Read this passage;
Things had been disappearing little by little in spite of Colonel Lázaro Aponte’s
determined vigilance, even the full-length closet with six mirrors . . . one night it
occurred to him to hold a spiritualist séance in order to clear up the mystery, and
the soul of Yolanda Xius confirmed in her own handwriting that it was in fact

30
 she who was recovering the knickknacks of happiness for her house of death. (p.
87-88)
Márquez is not attempting to entertain the reader with the inclusion of such elements. It
is a different reality that he is trying to present, beyond logic and reason.
Folklore has been considered an integral part of the work of the magical realists.
Márquez abandons linear, rational narrative structures in his fiction and includes folklore
elements such as omens, dreams, and superstitions. The narrator mentions these things with
an equanimity associated with ordinary events. The tears bubbling inside the widower Xius’s
heart, which Dr. Dionisio Iguarán can hear (p. 37); Pedro Vicario’s eleven-month long
insomnia (p. 80); the flooded Palace of Justice where the narrator finds the floating 322 pages
of the brief (p. 100); the soul of Yolanda Xius who talks to the mayor during a séance (p. 87);
and the knife that keeps coming out clean from Santiago’s body (p. 119); these are all
instances of magical realism. They are included in the narrative in the most unselfconscious
manner.
In the last analysis, it is as an ethnographer that Márquez is most effective, presenting his
community with intense compassion and understanding. You must read his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech to appreciate his concerns as a writer who chronicles the
underdevelopment and neglect of his community. Márquez (1982) begins his speech with an
overview of the colonial legacy, political turmoil, ethnocide, dictators, civil wars, and
military coups that have plagued the Latin American continent. He says:
I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression,
that has deserved the attention of the Swedish academy of letters.
The writer has a political agenda in presenting the locale with all its contradictions and
backwardness. The voices of the marginalized people are documented with undiluted respect.
The unnamed town in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a mislaid town where there is no
railroad and the people depend on the river for transport (p. 25). The roads are bad and dusty.
The only car that appears belongs to Bayardo’s father, who comes as a guest to the town. The
deprivation and neglect are mirrored in the bishop’s boat that doesn’t stop at the town. He
passes by with an empty blessing in the air. As Plácida Linero remarks: “He hates this town”
(p. 6). After Santiago Nasar’s death, there is no human sized freezer to preserve his body and
the only doctor, Dr. Dionisio Iguarán, is away. Father Amador who was once a medical
student conducts the autopsy in a disastrous way.
Transmission of information is primarily through rumour and gossip. In the uneventful
provincial life of the people, the arrival of an intriguing stranger is enough to capture the
imagination of the entire town. The marriage of Bayardo San Román and Angela Vicario
becomes a public spectacle, turning into a carnival of sorts.
The novel also hints at the multi-ethnic profile of the town, with its community of Arabs
and mulatto girls at the brothel. Victoria Guzmán and her daughter are descendants of

31
African slaves and Santiago and his family are Christian immigrants from the Middle East.
The inter-racial tension is palpable in Victoria Guzmán’s epithet for Santiago Nasar,
“whitey” and the call from a balcony when he is rushing towards his house: “Not that way,
Turk: by the old dock” (p. 8; p. 117). Violence is a part of their lives. Colonel Lázaro Aponte,
the mayor has caused many “repressive massacres” in his career (p. 77). Bayardo’s father is
war veteran, who fought during the civil war that wracked Colombia from the end of the last
century to the beginning of this one and in which nearly 100,000 people lost their lives.
Santiago’s family has had two barroom killers (p. 82). There are also some references
Colombia’s colonial past. Santiago asserts that a light that can be seen on the Caribbean Sea
from afar was “the soul in torment of a slave ship that had sunk with a cargo of blacks from
Senegal” (p. 67). It is mentioned in passing that the Palace of Justice at Riohacha was Sir
Francis Drake’s headquarter for a brief while. (p.100)
Not only is this small Colombian town underdeveloped, its’ social mores are also
antiquated. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold Márquez presents the collective consciousness
of the community, portraying its fatalism and its medieval code of honour. Santiago becomes
the scapegoat for breaking this code. However, Márquez never judges the people; through his
narrator he attempts to depict his society with utmost compassion and honesty.
Questions
i) Write short notes on the following characters:
- Victoria Guzmán
- Clotilde Armenta
- Pura Vicario
- Bayardo San Román
ii) Do you think that the title Chronicle of a Death Foretold is ironical? Give reasons for
your answer.
iii) “Angela Vicario subverts many of the chauvinistic codes of her society.” Elaborate this
statement.
iv) Identify and describe the elements of magical realism in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
v) Angelo Vicario is unlike the other women in her society because she refuses to deceive
Bayardo. Discuss, with reference to the novel.
vi) Identify and describe some features of the narrative style of Chronicle of a Death
Foretold.
vii) Discuss the characters of Pablo and Pedro Vicario in detail.

32
 Works Cited
Bell, Michael. “Male Tragedy/ Female Novella: Chronicle of a Death Foretold.” Gabríel
Garcia Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold: A Critical Companion, edited by P.
Unni Krishnan. Delhi, Worldview, 2001.
Asturias, Miguel Angel. Banquet Speech. Nobel Prize outreach AB 2022. Thu. 6 Jan 2022,
<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1967/asturias/speech/>
Márquez, Gabriel García. Banquet Speech. Nobel Prize outreach AB 2022. Fri. 7 Jan 2022,
<https;//www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/Márquez/lecture/>
Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo. The Fragrance of Guava: Conversations with Gabriel García
Márquez. London, Faber & Faber, 1983.
Phillips, Tom.”Nobel author Gabríel Garcia Márquez wins 17-year legal battle over murder
classic.” The Guardian, 30 Nov 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/
nov/30/gabriel-garcia-marquez-court-victory. Accessed 3 Dec 2021.
Sangari, Kumkum. “The Politics of the Possible or the Perils of Reclassification.” Gabriel
García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold: A Critical Companion, edited by P.
Unni Krishnan. Delhi, Worldview, 2001.
Williams, Raymond L. “Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Journalism.” Gabriel García
Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, edited by Jayanti Seth. Delhi, Doaba,
2001.

33