![]() ![]() The entire town claims that Santiago Nasar’s death was a tragedy, but all of them fail to warn him. Their belief that they had to murder Santiago Nasar to protect their family’s honour never wavers. The Vicario brothers never feel guilty, they accept that they committed the murder, but maintain that they are ‘innocent’. The guilt of this murder is not upon the Vicario brothers alone. The Chronicle is not about a simple revelation of the murderer, it is about taking a critical look at society, specifically at the insensitivity of honour killing. This is in stark contrast to Golden age crime fiction which was particularly obsessed with the idea of the ‘whole truth’ which is bound to come out in the end. How can we trust then the rest we hear about the murder? Tarnished memories mean that we may never know the truth. Some are convinced that it was a ‘radiant’ morning while others remember it to be ‘funereal’, foreshadowing Santiago’s death. Memories are indeed scattered in the chronicle, the townsfolk cannot even tell us ‘the truth’ about what the weather was like on the day of the murder. He describes his task to the readers: “… I returned to this forgotten village to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards.” We do not get a simple investigator but a journalistic figure attempting to ‘chronicle’ the events after they occur. In using magic realism, Marquez is shaping an indigenous culture and in playing with the detective fiction genre, he is subverting western literary norms. It is noteworthy that these coincidences baffle the investigative judge, a figure representative of western ideas of justice and governance. These fatal coincidences lend a sense of cosmic inevitability to the murder. She is a very well reputed interpreter of dreams, how could she then miss omens about her own son’s death? Was his death ‘fated’? Could nothing stop Santiago’s murder? How can these be explained by mere chance? His mother fails to find anything odd about Santiago Nasar’s repetitive dreams of trees. Santiago Nasar also fails to notice an anonymous note of warning that has been slipped into his house. Cristo Bedoya, the one friend who does try to warn him, fails to find him on time. The text tells us “No one even wondered whether Santiago Nasar had been warned, because it seemed impossible to all that he hadn’t”. They are occupied with the bishop’s visit, who does not even step out of his boat. As a result, almost anyone in the town could have warned Santiago Nasar but they simply fail to take the situation seriously. ![]() Why else would they announce their murder intentions to anyone who would hear it? They want someone to warn him. As the plot unfolds, it seems clear that the Vicario twins, who knew Santiago Nasar well, don’t really want to kill him. The magical realism of the text however goes beyond this logical explanation.Īn incredible number of chance occurrences create the perfect conditions for Santiago Nasar’s murder, I will only mention a few. ‘Logically’ speaking, Santiago Nasar’s murder is essentially an act of honour killing. It is not a Sherlockian demonstration of scientific reasoning. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.” The use of the surreal, makes the Chronicle an extraordinary murder mystery in many ways. Marquez was once quoted saying “In Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets. Magical realism is an untangling of reality, an attempt to discover what is mysterious in real human acts. Therein lies Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s well-known talent of integrating fantasy into otherwise realistic settings. Busy wondering about the relevance of the mundane, we slip into the magical- a world where Santiago’s dreams about timber trees could carry death omens. We are told that Santiago Nasar got up at five thirty that morning to wait for the boat that the bishop was coming on. The death is so ‘foretold’ that the first line of the novella tells its readers that this is the day ‘they’ were going to kill Santiago Nasar, raising the traditional question of a Whodunnit- Who killed Santiago Nasar and why? What follows this curious statement is a skillful shift to mundane details. An entire town knows that Santiago Nasar is going to be killed by the Vicario twins. If critical acclaim and a Nobel winning author don’t successfully draw you to The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, then let me tell you that it backtracks a murder enveloped in mystery, and yet there is no ‘solving the crime’. ![]()
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