Fate in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Chronicles of a Death Foretold

Categories: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

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“To what extent does the student show how their understanding of cultural and contextual elements was developed through the interactive oral?”

The collaboration and the outcome of my groups’ video was great. As a whole, we did our best to ensure that we did exactly what the prompt was asking us to do and in a way that the class can comprehend the scene through modernization. On the other hand, there were some things that we could have done better such as memorizing our lines, being structured and orderly with the recordings but overall, the message of our interactive oral was clear to the audience.

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Before recording, there were some chapters that I struggled with within the book and I found it a bit difficult to understand. That was due to multiple things occurring within the book all at once. However, as I broke down the chapter with my peers, as we were writing the scripts, I began to comprehend the book and the events that happened along as to why.

An example that I could not quite understand as I read the book Chronicle of a Death Foretold, was certain motifs ones such as honor. As I mentioned before, there were some events within the book that has prevented me from understanding the theme and the tone of the story, which affected understanding the significance as they were showcased due to narration. As I further found ways to apprehend the book, I decided to break down the roles of each character in the story and I finally understood how their actions wore made to protect their honor such as the Vicario Twins.

They were pursing Santiago to murder him; they clearly stated that they did it to regain their honor within the townspeople. Questions continued to race through my mind, and I wanted to know “How could a murder lead to regaining honor?” The interactive oral clarified things for me, as it was brought to life and through research I understood to book to make sure, my fellow peers understood it as well.

In novellas, authors usually have different styles of writings. In the modern world, it is important to show different perspectives in order to analyze an event within a book. Disjointed narrative is a narrative technique where events often occur, either in chronological order or in other ways where the narrative does not follow the direct causality pattern. It is sometimes used in literature, films, and hypertext websites. In Chronicles of a Death Foretold, the author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses literary devices such as disjointed narrative, foreshadowing and symbolism to develop the theme that one's memory will not always be reliable.

To begin with, the author uses disjointed narrative to build up suspense throughout the story. The first chapter states, 'On the first 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' (Marquez 3). The disjointed narrative further help to highlight that the author is creating his story; the structure of the book lies within the author. Despite the fact that the reader might be confused, Marquez uses the disjointed narrative to grab the reader's attention and to display a unique way for the reader to comprehend what is happening within the scene. As the story starts, Marquez uses foreshadow to let the readers know that they will witness something tragic happen with the main character. This information at the beginning has its advantages. The first advantage scrutinizes clarity and pace.

Likewise, if the story happened to start at the beginning with a linear format, showing scenes of growing importance, with nothing truly captivating happening, with only a few pages left for the story to be over with, the text would have been very dull. It would have had the same amount of pages, but, the creative piece would not have been as interesting as it is; it would have been portrayed so that any person reading it would have thought that the story is tedious. Nonetheless, because the story is disjointed, none of the dispersed past events require explication that, while giving the reader context, would be tiresome to the point where the reader does not want to continue reading the story anymore. Instead, the nonlinear format allows the novel to start on the day the action becomes combustible. The connection surrounding the flashback takes the place of linear narrative, and the story gains capability, that created suspense to bring out the theme of one’s memory, will not always be reliable.

Throughout the book, the narrator relies on the story of the other people to bring the book to reality. In doing this, the chances that many of these people, over the span of time, have memories that have become unreliable. As the author uses disjointed narrative throughout the story, he jumps around from citizen to citizen that lives in the town to showcase, and to understand everyone's partake in the murder, to further comprehend what they did to help out, while the murder was going on. It further shows the reader how unreliable majority of the citizens in the town are. The text states, 'Yamil Shaium shouted for him to get into his store and went to get his hunting gun, but he couldn't remember where he'd put the cartridges' (Marquez 115).

Towards the last few pages of the book, the writer, Marquez continued to use disjointed narrative, to enhance the theme and to keep the story interesting. In the community that the citizens live in, no one bothered to help Santiago, the main character as the twin Brothers Pedro and Pablo Vicario wanted to kill him. Mr.Yamil Shaium has a store in the town, as Santiago Nasar was trying the find his way home in time to not be murdered; Mr. Yamil called him so he could come into his store so he could hide. As he went to go find his hunting gun, he realized that he forgot where he put his cartridges. This shows that his memory was not reliable and he was falsely trying to help Santiago; he only called him just so it could look as if he was being a genuine person, which also implies foreshadowing within the story.

Furthermore, Yamil Shaium was not the only character who hypocritically had unreliable memory. Cristo Bedoya is a friend of the narrator's and the main character, Santiago Nasar. At the end of the book, the twin brothers approach him and tell him to warn Santiago because they were going to kill him. He does not do that but rather; give his testimony when the brothers killed Santiago. The novella states, 'If I'd known how to shoot a revolver, Santigo Nasar would be alive today,' “'he told me. “Nevertheless, the idea did impress him, after all, he had heard about the devastating power of an armor-plated bullet”(Marquez 108). Cristo Bedoya did not care as to whether Santiago stayed alive or not. While doing in-depth research, Cristo Bedoya was happy that Santiago was going to die; he gets a lot of glories and honor, and since that was his close friend, he can now get all of the glory and honor.

Cristo Bedoya is a fraud and a cheat towards Santiago, and for all of the reasons that he wanted to death of Santiago to occur. An important point that relates to the theme would be the symbolism that is portrayed within the novella. The author uses one of the characters as a symbol towards Santiago is impeding death. According to the text, At the moment of the crime he felt such despair and was so disgusted with himself that the only thing that he could think of was to think of the fire alarms” (Marquez 70) Father Amador Carmen, a priest in the story can be recognized as a religious symbol and can represent things such as Jesus Christ, purity and heaven. In the previous paragraphs’, Father Carmen had been analyzed and his actions showed that Santiago could not be saved from the evil Vicario Twins. The fact that he was not any use to Santiago; it can lead the audience to believe that not even the Heavens, nor Jesus could protect him.

In conclusion, there were many factors within the novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold that conveyed that there are just some things in life that are meant to happen. The disjointed narrative, foreshadowing, and symbolism all aided the audience in understanding the theme and the reasoning behind it. In the event that someone would confront Santiago about his death, the outcome would have been different but the characters within the story were set on unreliable memory and no one was going to tell him about his fate.