Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

First published:Crónica de una muerte anunciada, 1981 (English translation, 1982)

Type of plot: Mystery

Time of work: Early twentieth century

Locale: An unnamed Colombian village on the coast of Caribbean

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, who attempts to piece together the events leading up to the murder of Santiago Nasar
• Santiago Nasar, the murder victim
• Cristo Bedoya, his best friend and closest companion
• Angela Vicario, the bride whose loss of honor is avenged upon Nasar
• Pedro, and
• Pablo Vicario, her brothers, identical twins, who murder Nasar
• Bayardo San Román, the groom who returns his bride to her parents when he discovers that she is not a virgin

The Novel

The “chronicle” of the title is the attempt by the narrator to piece together events leading up to the murder of Santiago Nasar by Pedro and Pablo Vicario. He does so by drawing on his own memories as well as on the accounts of those who witnessed the murder and whom he sought out twenty-seven years after the event. Thus, the novel bears many of the trappings of a murder mystery, but it is hardly a conventional representative of that genre: The murderers had announced their intentions to everyone they met for hours before the event. What the narrator, and indeed all the characters need to learn, is how a murder so publicly announced could have occurred, with so many well-meaning people doing nothing to stop the Vicario brothers, who had little heart for carrying out the deed and who, by their open announcements, were in effect asking to be stopped.

As the novel begins, the narrator recounts Nasar’s waking about an hour before his death and telling his mother his dream of walking in a drizzle through a timber forest. Although she is a renowned interpreter of dreams, she fails to recognize the ominous foreboding of death. Her failure is the first of many to come, culminating in her barring the door through which Nasar is about to escape from his attackers, when she hears the crowd approaching at the end of the novel, thinking her son already safe inside the house.

The narrator’s reconstruction of the events of that morning is complicated by the varying accounts of people’s whereabouts, their awareness of the brothers’ intentions, and their feelings toward Nasar. They cannot even agree on the weather that morning, whether it was radiantly pleasant or oppressively funereal. The narrator objectively records all details, scarcely weighing them for consistency or import, possibly because he is attempting a purely journalistic account, and possibly because he resembles his mother in the way, as he notes, “she is accustomed to noting . . . superfluous detail when she wants to get to the heart of the matter.”

Nasar is murdered by the Vicario brothers to avenge their sister Angela’s dishonor. She had married Bayardo San Román the previous day, but after a day and a night of extravagant feasting by the village, the groom discovers that his bride is not a virgin and returns her to her home. Her mother beats her, and upon questioning by her brothers, Angela Vicario identifies Santiago Nasar as her “perpetrator.” Their duty is clear. They take two of the knives they use in their trade of slaughtering pigs, sharpen them at another butcher’s shop, then wait in Clothilda Armenta’s milk shop, from which they can watch Nasar’s bedroom window, until he goes out to see the bishop who is to come and bless the village. They carry out their simple plan, to butcher Nasar at his front door, and profoundly change the lives of everyone who has gathered to watch.

The Characters

There is little attempt to represent the deep psychological dimensions of the characters, as has been prevalent in the novel in English since Henry James and Virginia Woolf. The characters are rather ingredients in Gabriel García Márquez’s so-called Magical Realism, a Latin American offshoot of Surrealism, in which the fantastic is ordinary. These characters are like flowers in a small garden so exotic that the observer is astonished almost beyond understanding; they are more the inhabitants of folktale, myth, and legend, than of the twentieth century.

Even the narrator remains oddly unknowable, though he is clearly García Márquez’s fictive alter ego (he tells how he proposed to his wife Mercedes, for example, and mentions her sister and aunt by name). He is a sort of wide-eyed, baffled observer, a student visiting home during the period of the novel, who simply likes his fellow villagers so much that he cannot find any wickedness in them—the forgivable sins of lust and drunkenness, perhaps, but not the malice that could produce the unthinkable murder of one of their own citizens in broad daylight, with practically the whole village as witnesses.

What the characters lack in psychological shading, they make up for in abundance of color. The groom Bayardo San Román arrived in town with silver decorating his saddlebags, belt, and boots, looking for someone to marry. He had “the waist of a novice bullfighter, golden eyes, and a skin slowly roasted by saltpeter.” Magdelena Oliver could not take her eyes off him and told the narrator that she “could have buttered him and eaten him alive.” He could swim faster, drink longer, and fight better than any man in town, and was far richer than any of them; every woman in town would have married him, except for the girl he wanted at first sight: Angela Vicario. He bought all the raffle tickets to win a music box for her, then bought the best house in town for her, though it was not for sale. (The sight of all the money he put on the table ultimately killed the owner.)

Bayardo’s character may justly be said to be flat because he is little more than a vehicle for machismo, but such a stylistic choice enables García Márquez to portray his characters as victims trapped by the prevailing codes of their lives, as outmoded as they may be judged, which leads directly to the absurd murder of Nasar because he violated Angela, although no one is ever sure that he was guilty. Indeed, the reader will not find the characters divisible into categories of major and minor, but only find those who appear more often and those who appear less, and all contribute to the unlikelihood of the central action. Magdelena Oliver, who first reacts to Bayardo’s male beauty, appears but once, and her comment stands not as her own opinion but as the ultimate consensus of the village. It is as though the village itself were the main character of the novel, speaking with many voices; in this reading, the murder itself becomes a ritualistic, communal suicide in which the forty-two characters who are named in the novel (and many more of their brothers and sisters and cousins) are helpless participants.

Thus, of the murdered man and the woman he allegedly wronged, the reader learns little more than of the characters on the perimeter of the central drama: The lesser characters serve as a kind of moral reflection of the central ones. There is Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, for example, the elegant, serviceable woman who never sleeps and who, as the narrator attests, “did away with my generation’s virginity,” including that of Nasar, who dies for a crime that for the woman is a vocation.

Nasar is a fairly affluent young man, inclined to womanizing and drinking with friends. He dies not so much because his guilt is established, but because he is typical and therefore able to be presumed guilty. His public execution at the end of the novel is described as in slow motion and in precise detail, in more detail than any aspect of his life, because his death more profoundly affects the village than his life could. Until he dies, the characters are locked into the modes of action that will produce his death. Once that is accomplished, they are freed to pursue their individual lives again, though this time, haunted by a terrible memory.

Critical Context

Because many characters reappear in his works, because many of the works are set in Macondo (unnamed here, but recognizable as the fictional counterpart of his birthplace, Aracataca), and because of the persistently fabulous nature of his Magical Realism, García Márquez’s novels and short stories may be said to constitute one grand fiction, of which Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a significant part.

García Márquez’s treatment of isolation and solitude in previous work extends to this novel. Macondo’s search for a way inland to other villages in One Hundred Years of Solitude is ended here with the coming of the railroad, on which many of the characters will leave following the murder. The novel also is linked by contrast with the short story “El ahogado más hermoso del mundo” (1972; “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” 1972), in which a drowned man is taken in by the inhabitants of a stagnant town after he washes up on shore, becoming a source of community pride. Care for the drowned man removes the villagers from their individual and collective solitude, as contrarily the community’s witnessing the death of Nasar jolts its members out of their “linear habits” and into an obsession with their guilt. Where in El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975) the aging dictator is isolated by his tyrannical power, here the villagers are cut off from one another by their failure to use their power to prevent Nasar’s death.

In interviews, García Márquez has often equated his fiction with journalism (he began his career as a journalist in 1948) and has said that the fantastic elements in his work are merely the reality of Latin America, faithfully transcribed. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he has written an investigative report of the circumstances of a murder. Yet he turns the genre of the mystery novel inside out in order to create his own convoluted, cyclical form of storytelling. It begins when the victim rises and ends one hour later with his death, but in between the narrator retraces the impossible labyrinth of circumstances and chance and the unwinding of its terrible consequences. Thus, the artist triumphs over the journalist, as García Márquez’s humanity prevails in the foolish beauty of his unfortunates, and in their resilient good nature that struggles with fate to an outcome somewhat better than a draw.

Bibliography

Antioch Review. XLI, Summer, 1983, p. 380.

The Atlantic. CCLI, May, 1983, p. 103.

Bilowit, Ira J. “Graciela Daniele: Chronicle of a Chronicle.” Back Stage 36 (June 16, 1995): 32-33. Profiles the efforts of director and choreographer Graciela Daniele to adapt Márquez’s novel to the stage. She talks about specific scenes in the book as well as the process through which she tried to interpret Márquez’s verbal metaphors into dance.

Christie, John S. “Fathers and Virgins: García Márquez’s Faulknerian Chronicle of a Death Foretold.” Latin American Literary Review 21 (January-June, 1993): 21-29. Christie draws parallels between Márquez’s novel and Faulkner’s Light in August. In both novels, the people in a small town manipulate facts leading to the killing of an accused criminal. It is likely that Angela’s blind father is really the perpetrator, yet Santiago Nasar is the one accused and murdered.

Christian Science Monitor. July 6, 1983, p. 9.

Hudson Review. XXXVI, Autumn, 1983, p. 552.

Library Journal. CVIII, April 1, 1983, p. 758.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 10, 1983, p. 1.

The New York Review of Books. XXX, April 14, 1983, p. 3.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, March 27, 1983, p. 1.

Newsweek. C, November 1, 1982, p. 82.

Rendon, Mario. “The Latino and His Culture: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 54 (December, 1994): 345-348. Rendon discusses the mechanism of letter writing through which the protagonist achieves transcendent growth. Like psychoanalysis, it helps her to confront, and ultimately reject, the social rules that shape her identity. Rendon also makes the interesting point that the novel was published during the Cold War, when people were only too aware that they too stood at the brink of death.

Sims, Robert L. “From Fictional to Factual Narrative: Contemporary Critical Heteroglossia, Gabriel García Márquez.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 25 (Spring, 1992): 21-60. Focusing on narratology, Sims presents a critique of Márquez’s journalism and bigeneric writing. He discusses Chronicle of a Death Foretold in some detail.

Styron, Rose. “Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Kenzaburo Oe: From the Rose Styron Conversations.” New Perspectives Quarterly 14 (Fall, 1997): 56-62. A revealing interview with three renowned authors. They share their views on topics such as women and power, first and lost love, journalism as literature, spirit and faith, and multiculturalism.

West Coast Review of Books. IX, May, 1983, p. 40.