Death Foretold Symbolism

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a 1980s novella written by Gabriel García Márquez. It takes place in a small Colombian town in the 1950s. The story surrounds the unofficial investigation of the death of Santiago Nasar, a man who was accused of taking Angela Vicario’s virginity. Angela’s brothers carry out the murder of Santiago after hearing about what he supposedly did. Twenty-seven years later the narrator of the book attempts to document the events and does so with a sense of inevitability that is created by both the disjointed structure that the narrator uses to tell the story and the cluelessness and beliefs that so many of the characters have. The characters in Chronicle all have a strong belief in honor that is a central factor in their lives and they are held up, by both each other and themselves, to the standards of machismo and marianismo. By looking at those beliefs, it can be seen how honor, machismo, and marianismo contributed to Pedro, Pablo, and Purisima becoming the type of people who hurt those who stray from the path that their society deems acceptable. Machismo glorifies all things male and puts men into the …show more content…
A hypocritical decision considering that the Vicario brothers and their friends enjoyed spending their free time at a local brothel with the “pleasurable mulatto girls”, and in Chronicle there was never any mention of the Vicarios or the prostitutes and their families being murdered for their sexual acts (64). This just further shows how machismo plays a defining role in all of the Vicario brothers’ scenes, beginning with their need to possess all of the knowledge their sister possesses, and ending with their quick jump from knowing to killing, as if it were perfectly natural to murder someone for disrespecting their family’s