Santiago Nasar Symbolism

Throughout Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Santiago Nasar’s front door embodies his looming veil of fate and eventual sacrificial altar. This main door represents both the recurring theme of fate as well as the religious allusion to the cross of the crucified Christ. As with each of the motifs in the novella, Gabriel Garcia Marquez develops the symbolic doors enough to intimate Latin American beliefs and values and allude to Santiago’s innocence, but not enough to satisfy the loose ends left dangling after the conclusion. This symbolic ambiguity strengthens his technique and purpose: using magic realism to manifest the otherworldly constituents of a culture framed upon tradition, honor, and superstition.
Appropriately named the “fatal door”,

This magic realism technique leaves the reader with a clear understanding of the message without a definitive answer to the plot’s central question. After the attack, Placida Linero’s main door “was all chipped with knife thrusts”, and “it was necessary to use public funds to repair [it]” (49). The door represents the town’s guilt over the murder, further emphasizing Santiago’s implied innocence. The townspeople, all feeling shared remorse over the incident, figuratively pay for the wrong through paying for the damaged door. This detail corresponds with the other meanings of the door. After the murder, the door represents not only Santiago’s fate but the fate of the entire town. The event shakes them from their established rituals, changing the course, or fate, of their lives. From a religious perspective, the door represents Santiago’s suffering not only for Angela, but the entire town, and thus paying for it becomes repentance for the wrong they committed. In its entirety, the door strongly suggests Santiago’s innocence, so much so that the reader expects the mystery to be resolved by the end of the novel. However, when it is not, symbols and details are the only clues Marquez leaves. When public funds pay for the damaged main door, Marquez evolves the murder from Santiago’s story to the town’s story, and with their symbolized guilt alludes to his innocence through magical realism