Analysis of a story foretold

“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.” Thats how Chronicle of a Death foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez starts. This is the third novel by Garcia Marquez that I am reading and every time the very first line of the book completely arrests my attention. When I see the first lines of the other two novels (One Hundred Years of solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera) after reading the novels, I find that the entire theme of the story is hidden in that one line. But in The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the first line is a prophecy clear enough to understand what the entire story is about. The outline is made, the colours were left to be filled but the beauty with which Garcia Marquez gradually fills those colours keeps the onlookers bound to it.

This is a story about the death of a Santiago Nasar, a rich Arab man who was accused of taking the virginity of Angela Vicario, who was sent back home on the wedding night by her husband on realising this, by her two twin brothers, Pablo and Pedro Vicario.

Bayardo San Roman had come to the town to find a bride for himself and did so in Angela Vicario. Owing to his great wealth and family name, the marriage was fixed. The incidents marriage and the incidents preceding it became a legend because of the magnitude of the expenditure involved. But on the wedding night, Bayardo San Roman found out that Angela Vicario wasn’t a virgin and left her back at her house where she told her brothers that it was Santiago Nasar. Her brothers, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, in a show of their machismo and fight for honour, went about announcing that they would kill Santiago Nasar and so they did. After the killing, they surrendered and were sent for trial which lasted three years and they were relieved on the grounds of protecting the honour of one’s family. Angela Vicario developed strength to move on with her life in another city from where she wrote letters continuously to Bayardo San Roman, with whom she had fallen in love. Bayardo San Roman, after being drunk for a week, was retrieved by his family. After receiving letters from her every week for seventeen years, he returned to her.

That is to sum up the basic outline of the plot. The plot is more of a journalistic account of a murder, recorded through accounts of different people twenty years after the actual murder had taken place. The words ‘chronicle’ as defined by the oxford dictionary means ‘a factual written account of important or historical events in the order of their occurrence’ but Garcia Marquez manages to play both parts of the definition of the word.

First of all the account is not factual. This is very well cleared out in the very start when the accounts of Victoria Guzman and Placido Linero about whether it was a sunny day or a rainy one contradict each other. But another argument people like me would present to it is that the narrator is factually presenting the witnessed accounts of different people without adding much of his own opinion to it and if these accounts contradict each other, it may add ambiguity but it certainly does not make it fictional.

Secondly, the account is non linear. It starts with the day of the murder, goes back into the past, moves into the future and comes back to the same day. But again, I come up with the same argument. It event may not be presented in the order of its occurrence, but it certainly comes to us in the order the statements were actually recorded.

Now what to believe may certainly depend on what we shall take as the event, the collection of details or the details in itself. I would say that for this to be a story rather than a piece of reporting, the part of it being reported should be seen as a part of the story. But the truth is that is where Marquez has done what he does the best – Demarcation, demarcation between real and fantasy, tale and history and in this novella, demarcation between reporting and storytelling.

Another small point that couldn’t go unnoticed was how Marquez used cross reference to his previous text, One Hundred Years of Solitude by mentioning the characters of Colonel Aureliano Buendia and Colonel Gerineldo Marquez.

Now about the signature of the author – Magical Realism. Again I noticed the detailing induced every time something fantastic was being told. The detailed description about how easily Santiago Nasar walked back to his home even after being 7 deadly and innumerous other blows by knives, used to slice pigs generated awe in the mind of readers about the atrocious and ineffective nature of the crime. A handful more such incidents can easily be quoted from the book. The usage of this technique is the differentiation of the story from a normal journalistic account.

The most visible theme in the entire plot is Honour. A murder takes place when the entire town and the authorities know about it beforehand. Still the murder takes place and though everyone is traumatised and feels sympathy with the soon to die character of the plot, a very few actually step forward to make an attempt to stop it. Everyone in the town respects the situation of the Vicario brothers who need to kill the man who perpetrated their sister. Even the judicial authorities in the end pardon such a crime.

The events in the novel depicts a society where demonstration of money and power is the only way to earn respect, where ‘honour’ of a family is held higher than one’s life, where disgrace brought to the name of one member leads to the outcasting of the entire family, where prostitution is glorified and where all rules of purity are defined for women. I think we all live in a very similar society which may have advanced but is still built on the same fundamentals.

The novel is built on a real incident but still the way in which fiction creeps into the story keeps it far away from just reporting. In one of his interviews, Garcia Marquez had said that he wanted to merge journalism and fiction so that what people read shall be true stories but whenever they start to get bored, fiction should take over to keep them interested. Repetition of events while a lot of major portions missing from the story add to the essence of the report but the continuous switch to world of fantasy reminds us that we are still reading a story and not an article. Some say that Garcia Marquez is the master of magical realism but I would say that it is just an example, he is the masters the art of blurring the distinguishing lines between two contrary things and he shows that to us once again with two new sets of opposing things.

In a story where the entire plot is foretold, Garcia Marquez still manages to create an atmosphere of suspense through the ambiguity regarding the real lover of Angela. Though every action in the novel hints us that it wasn’t Santiago Nasar, it is never said explicitly and the open ending of the novel gives us the space to interpret and thus debate about what may have actually happened. In a story foretold, Garcia Marquez instils an element of surprise that everyone wants to know about thus countering the repetitiveness which renders it boring. Usage of many such tools makes it a quick read.

To conclude, Garcia Marquez has used his magic to frame an interesting story out a plot foretold and characters which were completely flat and predictable. The ability to twist facts and hence play around with them makes this piece a work of art. As someone who tries writing, I would say that his ability to build out something this beautiful (Not the events which were pretty violent) from nothing in the form of plot and character, through just the way it is told, deserves all the appreciation he has got in the form of Nobel and Pullitzer awards.