Corruption In Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

In a time and place where corruption was ubiquitous, Gabriel García Márquez’s primary objective was to unveil the overlooked evils. He exposed the brokenness of government, family, and romance, but never dared to blatantly criticize something as untouchable as the Church. Nevertheless, hidden in the retelling of an actual murder is Márquez’s report on the perversions of the modern Church. In his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, biblical figures are manipulated to reflect Colombia’s contemporary Christians and the narrative of Jesus Christ is recreated in a frantic attempt to bring healing. The resulting product is the censored belief that the institution of religion has rotted and lost its resemblance to the concept of righteousness that it was founded on. …show more content…
Jesus’s death is foreshadowed from the genesis of The Bible, while Santiago Nasar’s murderers admit that “there’s no way out of this... it’s as if it already happened” (Márquez 61). And although there is much focus on the exact timing of the last hours of Santiago Nasar’s life, Márquez chooses to remove the events from their sequential order, contradicting the very title of the novel. If one were to reorder the novel chronologically, the events would then follow the timeline of The Bible’s centerpiece. This inconsistency exposes a hidden detail, that Chronicle of a Death Foretold is not simply the story of Santiago Nasar, but of Jesus