Chronicle Of A Death Foretold Literary Analysis

In the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel García-Márquez, Márquez uses structure and magical realism to make Santiago’s death inevitable, highlighting the idea that fate is inescapable, and that it outweighs ideals such as truth or justice.
In part one, the reader learns that the novel is written from what seems to be the perspective of an old friend of Santiago’s who is piecing together the events leading up to Santiago’s death, 27 years after Santiago has died. The narrator puts together the events as told by many different people, relying on their memories to gain a clearer picture of what occurred all those many years ago. As such, the information given to the reader is often contradictory and unreliable, which creates ambiguity …show more content…
In the first part of Chronicle of Death Foretold, Plácida Linero interprets Santiago’s dreams, seeing the birds as good omens, rather than the bad omen of trees. Of course, she was a well-reputed dream interpreter, so long as one told her them before eating. She had not seen the trees, but was most worried about the rain, and her son catching cold on the day he died. She focused on the mundane, rather than the supernatural, and thus she missed the trees in his dreams, which is what she chooses to blame herself for in the end, rather than closing and barring the door when Santiago is being chased. After Santiago left the house, he met with others, and Clotilde Armenta said, “He already looked like a ghost.” She had accepted that he was going to die.Throughout the novel, people were saying things like, “‘There’s no way out of this,’ he told him. ‘It’s as if it had already happened’”(61), and “It was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead”(72). The other characters felt and experienced the cyclical time flow, and this strange time flow, a trait of magical realism, made Santiago’s death all the more inevitable. His death was fated, and thus everyone knew it, and …show more content…
But the fact that even after his death, the twins went essentially scott free, and the truth was never truly confirmed means that fate outweighs justice and truth, and that in the face of fate, such values are meaningless. The reader is left to wonder, was Santiago actually the one who tarnished Angela’s honor? According to many, Santiago was a kind and good-hearted man. But from the point of view of Divina Flor and her mother, was justice served? Did Santiago et what he deserved? Did Angela actually lie about it for some reason? The ambiguity in the novel leaves the reader to wonder, but for the purposes of the novel, they are meaningless, as the truth is meaningless when fate is inescapable, according to the