Chronicle Of A Death Foretold Suspense Essay

In a rural town in Columbia, on the edge of a river and removed from the rest of society, the setting for Chronicle of a Death Foretold sets the scene for a murder both shocking, and yet expected. Unlike most murder mysteries, in which the readers are pulled through an elaborate maze of clues and foreshadowing, desperately trying to find the perpetrator, Gabriel Garcia Marquez takes an interesting approach of revealing the murder and perpetrators relatively early in the novel. Santiago Nasar’s death is laid at the feet of the audience from the first few pages, and the usual suspense and tension present in a murder centric novel is absent. Yet, that does not mean there is a lack of suspense or tension within the novel as a whole, rather we are

In a way, the murder was the climax of a story never told, a story told twenty seven years prior to the writing of the novel, at least in the view of the narrator. As presented to the readers, unlike the death of a traditional novel character, the death of Santiago Nasar allows for a less emotional approach to the entire situation as a whole. Instead of the shock of the climax of the story, the death is treated as a past event, so the reader is left instead with an urge to understand how that came to be, rather than who did it or being surprised by the murder itself. Even with the tension of the murder gone, the story still reads as an urgent race towards the facts, towards the conclusion in which we get the final painting of the murder as a whole. Much of this urgency can be explained through the fact that the narrator is very much personally invested in the incident as a whole, considering the fact that he is a friend of Santiago Nasar, a cousin of Angela, and a member of the community as a whole. This relationship and investment, along with the urge to put together the pieces of the day of the murder, all lends to the tension present within the