Chronicle Of A Death Foretold By Gabriel Gracia Marquez

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a Spanish novella by Gabriel Gracia Marquez, published in 1981. It’s the story of the murder of Santiago Nasar by the twin Vicario brothers. Marquez has told the story of the murder in the form of a pseudo-journalistic reconstruction, where the reader is repeatedly in the chapters told about the murder through different perspectives. The novella is based on a real life event which occurred in a family in Columbia. A young couple which got married and on the following day of their wedding, the groom rejected the bride, as she was not a virgin. She was determined to have had relations with her boyfriend, who was later murdered by the bride’s two brothers in order to avenge the family’s honor.
Marquez has made …show more content…

It gives details bit by bit, and the sequence of events is haphazardly put. The narrator revels that the court upheld the twins’ statement as they said it was an honor killing and later explains how they behaved in the hours preceding the murder. It’s ironical, that even though the brothers try to appear macho and strong upholding the family honor, they are as much the victim of the society’s rigid convention as is their sister. As Clotilde Armenta says, that they had the ‘horrible duty; imposed upon them. The brothers’ know that being a man they have to uphold the family honor by avenging their sister. The main point being that the twins did not actually want to kill Santiago …show more content…

We can notice that even though the two brothers could not refuse to their ‘horrible duty’ they try everything to get someone else to stop them. ‘I knew what they were upto….. what a man should do’ , Pablo even stands to lose the love of his fiancée, it reveals that men are expected to live up to a certain code of honor even if it mean killing. They are failed one after another by the town’s people as nobody tries to stop them, including the town mayor who is the arbiter of law, and the priest who authorizes the morality of the community. They are more concerned with the meaningless ceremony and rituals than they are with actually safeguarding the lives of the people they serve.
‘No matter ,how much I scrubbed with soap and rags ,t couldn’t get rid of the smell’, the comment by Pedro reveals the guilt that the twins felt after the murder , the smell of Santiago’s blood indeed pervaded the whole town on the death of his day, implicating everyone in his murder. The concept of honor is strong in the narrator’s society, a man must defend the family honor by killing if necessary. Marquez has shown in this novella

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