Essay on "Chronicle of a Death Foretold"

Essay 4 pages (1225 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Chronicle of Death

Morality, Injustice, and the Importance of Knowing: Themes in Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Ambiguity has become one of the hallmarks of the modern novel. Authors like Margaret Atwood and Tim O'Brien have made the fluid nature of truth in a work of fiction explicit through such means as completely unreliable narrators in the case of the former, and completely unreliable reality in the case of the latter. This extension of post-modernist doubt does an interesting thing in a work of fiction; though ultimately all meaning is considered arbitrary despite its apparent certainty, there is a concretely observable abstract meaning to be found in these works' attempts to undermine certainty. That is, when the reliability of the story being told is called into serious doubt, meaning does not simply disappear, but rather shifts from an attribute of the story to an attribute of the telling.

In few works is this concept more explicitly rendered than in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The facts of the plot are not under serious question here, but as the various perspectives and stories that make up this novel come together, it becomes clear that the true facts are few and far between. Santiago Nasar was murdered by Pedro and Pablo Viscario, that much is clear. It also seems clear that they did so believing he had taken their sister's virginity, and it is certain that they told many people of their plan shortly before it was carried out. The rest is left for the reader to guess; there are no other certainties of any real value to be found in the book. It is unclear whether or not Santiago had ever been with, let alone slept with, Angela Viscario, it is unclear that this would have been considered a just cause for his death, and it is unclear why the Viscario brothers were permitted to carry out the killing.

This last point is one of the most essential questions asked in the story. The twins tell there plans to everyone they encounter between the time they make their plan and the time they carry it out. Even the local authorities are informed, and the twins have their knives taken away in order to prevent violence, but they are not themselves restrained and simply get other knives, have them sharpened, and succeed in stabbing Santiago to death outside his home. Meanwhile, the many member of the town who have been told about the murderous plot, either by the Viscario brothers or by others who have already heard, claim to assume that the twins do not plan on carrying out the act. The real motivation behind the town's permitting of the murder to occur can never be explicitly known, but there are clues that the people of the town actually become consumed by their interest and disgust about the breach of morality that they fail to see the value and importance of one man's life.

The unreliability of the narrator makes this difficult to perceives at first. Within three pages, he offers two different conclusions bout what the people of the town were thinking. At first, he acknowledges that "many of those on the docks knew that [the twins] were going to kill Santiago Nasar" (Marquez 19). The narrator never attempts to provide an explanation of why these people wouldn't have stopped the brothers from carrying out their plan, however. Instead, he simply changes the amount of knowledge that the townspeople supposedly had: "The only thing they knew for sure was that Angelo Viscario's brothers were waiting for him to kill him (Marquez 21). This equivocation on the part of the narrator… READ MORE

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