Chronicle Of A Death Foretold Research Paper

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit…” (Marquez 1) This reads as the opening line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Prize winning novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Championed as a pioneer in the genre of magical realism, Marquez is a Colombian novelist whose work draws on cultural experience, tales, beliefs, and proverbs. It is these elements incorporated in his literature that depart from a self-conscious ‘reality’. Generally, when readers

In the piece Performing Fiction(s)/Performing Folklore: “Magical Realism” as a literary trope/Folklore, Elaine J. Lawless explores the development of the term. She writes, “…It is my contention that as long as writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez were being read only in their native language by Latin readers, what they were performing upon the "stage" of their fictions did not need explanation or a new literary term to define it. My argument would be that Latin readers recognized how filled these works were with the shared folklore and the beliefs of Latin communities…” (Lawless Web). Within Latin communities, there are many widespread beliefs that within their context, ghosts living amongst them would not come as a surprise or unusual. Spirits are “second nature” and belief in Roman Catholic saints and figures are very much an aspect of ordinary life, evident in their own popular culture, religion, folklore, and experience (Lawless Web). Lawless makes the claim that with the new translations of texts from this region of the world for a translated audience, critics sought after a term that would tend to this “different” Latin fiction in a world of highbrow literature. Out of convenience, critics quickly dealt with works that maintained aspects that were not usual to them (such as the supernatural world and subliminal hints at a world beyond our own) or

This ensued the controversy of magical realism and how it became a blanket term for work that was glaringly Latin American and whether or not it could be classified as the ‘most important writerly mode’ within Latin fiction (Lawless Web). In the global arena, the term has evolved into a literary trope concerning various indigenous and ethnic writers as well as writers and women of color and more who incorporate their own backgrounds in their work. This has led to a substantial amount of frustration amongst marginalized