Chronicle Of A Death Foretold Literary Analysis Essay

Throughout Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez creates a narrator who is relied upon to retell a series of events, but ironically fails to do so. The narrator interviews people who tell him their depictions and memories of the murder of Santiago Nasar, which took place 27 years ago, so the retelling of events comes from a plethora of people and there are many different versions of the same story. This causes much confusion to readers because information comes from many different sources and his lack of quotes lead readers to believe that the narrator witnessed Santiago’s killing, when in fact, he did not. Through the narrator's odd sequencing of these retellings by numerous people, his inability to ever mention his name, as well as his own opinions and holes in stories filled in by him, the narrator becomes exceedingly unreliable as the novel progresses. The reader is thus left with a jumbled …show more content…
The narrator remembers his own whereabouts the night before his death with, “[...] as soon as I went in I caught the smell of a warm woman and I saw the eyes of an insomniac leopard in the darkness, and then I didn’t know anything else about myself until the bells rang” ( Marquez 68). Here he proves to the reader that he was not present at the time of Santiago’s death and therefore should not include his insights because they only add to his unreliability. He also describes his recount of the Vicario brother’s activities from the time of Angela’s return to them, to waiting on the bench for Santiago’s return from seeing the Bishop who came to town that day. He explains that he found out about the twins whereabouts from Maria Cervantes, Clotilde Armenta, and Faustino Santos, the butcher in town. The narrator continuously uses the memories of people he interviews as his own recollections and becomes the main source of the “facts” of the entire