Unreliability and Tranquility
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses a first person perspective to illustrate the many noticeable elements among some passages, such as character, plot and setting. The unreliable narrator brings these elements to our attention by creating a fictitious yet journalistic atmosphere. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known for frequently using a journalistic approach in his novels, therefore bringing a high line of interest in the very first few lines of the novel. Beyond this, Márquez himself said that reading is essential to becoming a good journalist, and journalism helped him maintain contact with reality, which he considers essential to writing good literature (Peter H. Stone, Broadcast Interview). …show more content…
For example, Divina Flor remembers Santiago grabbing her hand and her thinking it was a “hand that felt frozen and stony, like that hand of a deadman” (13). As readers, we are likely to define this as a strong exaggeration on her part when in fact, we could also interpret this as a representation of fate in the novel. One might think that it is fate that brings Santiago Nasar to his death, rather than the killers themselves. When Victoria tosses steaming rabbit entrails to voracious dogs, a shaken Santiago tells her, “Don’t be a savage… Make believe it was a human being” (10). This scene foreshadows his “moan of a calf” (118) when the Vicario brothers murder Santiago with butcher knives. Foreshadowing is typically achieved through an author's implication that an event is going to occur yet Gabriel García Márquez adds a twist to foreshadowing by telling exactly what is going to happen but not why it will happen. He tells us on the first page, “on the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on“ (1). The entire story builds on the foretelling of Santiago's murder. Finally, this brings us directly to the denotation of the title, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. We receive an evident repetition of the title about midway through the novel, “there had never been a death more foretold” (50). This helps put Gabriel García Marquez’s ideas in place and helps us find context in the story. In conclusion, the premonition and foreshadowing add to the strong sense of unreliability in the novel, even if it is not directly from the narrator, but the witnesses
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses a first person perspective to illustrate the many noticeable elements among some passages, such as character, plot and setting. The unreliable narrator brings these elements to our attention by creating a fictitious yet journalistic atmosphere. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known for frequently using a journalistic approach in his novels, therefore bringing a high line of interest in the very first few lines of the novel. Beyond this, Márquez himself said that reading is essential to becoming a good journalist, and journalism helped him maintain contact with reality, which he considers essential to writing good literature (Peter H. Stone, Broadcast Interview). …show more content…
For example, Divina Flor remembers Santiago grabbing her hand and her thinking it was a “hand that felt frozen and stony, like that hand of a deadman” (13). As readers, we are likely to define this as a strong exaggeration on her part when in fact, we could also interpret this as a representation of fate in the novel. One might think that it is fate that brings Santiago Nasar to his death, rather than the killers themselves. When Victoria tosses steaming rabbit entrails to voracious dogs, a shaken Santiago tells her, “Don’t be a savage… Make believe it was a human being” (10). This scene foreshadows his “moan of a calf” (118) when the Vicario brothers murder Santiago with butcher knives. Foreshadowing is typically achieved through an author's implication that an event is going to occur yet Gabriel García Márquez adds a twist to foreshadowing by telling exactly what is going to happen but not why it will happen. He tells us on the first page, “on the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on“ (1). The entire story builds on the foretelling of Santiago's murder. Finally, this brings us directly to the denotation of the title, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. We receive an evident repetition of the title about midway through the novel, “there had never been a death more foretold” (50). This helps put Gabriel García Marquez’s ideas in place and helps us find context in the story. In conclusion, the premonition and foreshadowing add to the strong sense of unreliability in the novel, even if it is not directly from the narrator, but the witnesses