Chronicle Of A Death Foretold Essay

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‘CHRONICLE’ AS A METAFICTIONAL NOVEL

As J.S Christie has noted in his essay on Marquez, it can be a little risky to attempt reading a coherent, unified meaning into a work when much of the critical material surrounding it celebrates its fragmentation, its indecipherable artifice, and its purely textual, metafictional focus. Although, as is said about one of the characters in the novel, 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold' tends “to conceal rather than reveal" its secrets, this in no way implies that answers to the novel’s mysteries cannot be found, or that such an exploration is without reward. Marquez's technique of segregating the biblical and mythical allusions from their referents, his patterns of undisclosed information, and the general unreliability of his detective narrator - all contribute to the critics' hesitation in drawing any meaningful conclusion to the novel's central mystery. Yet, the existence in the novel of narrative ambiguities, such as the frequently …show more content…

However, even as the novel claims that it it is a chronicle, that is, a historical record of facts and events arranged chronologically, it subverts, through the course of the text, its initial and apparent intention. Not only does its achronology and the tendentious comments of the narrator violate the norms of the genre, in addition, the account fails to establish the facts that led to Santiago's punishment for supposedly having deflowered Angela. 'Chronicle' is, then, a redundant and temporally dislocated work whose narrative fabric is woven around numerous repetitions, conjectures and versions - generally contradictory. Defining the method by which history reassigns meaning to the object of study, historian and theorist Hayden White

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