Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of those authors whose books come with their name printed larger than the title. In other words, his reputation precedes him. I read Marquez’s most well-known novel, 100 Years of Solitude, for the course “Varieties of the Fantastic in Fiction” two years ago. Like that novel, Marquez’s slightly more recent novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a nonlinear story based in an insular Columbian community, which touches on the topics of culture, scandal, and honor.
The novella begins with a description of the morning that Santiago Nasar was murdered. The night before, he had attended the wedding of Bayardo San Roman, a newcomer to the town, and Angela Vicario, a local. At this time, Santiago Nasar had no idea that only a few hours after the wedding Bayardo San Roman had returned his bride to her parents’ house in disgrace, having learned that she was not a virgin, and that Angela Vicario had accused Santiago Nasar of being her former lover, and that her two brothers had resolved to murder him in order to restore their sister’s honor. He also did not know that all morning the Vicario brothers had been going around town openly carrying butchers’ knives and announcing their plan to anyone they came across. Santiago Nasar would spend several hours in town interacting with different people, almost all of whom knew of the plot, and none of whom would either warn him or do anything else to prevent his death. By the time Santiago Nasar was finally warned, it was too late, and he was murdered on the steps of his mother’s house.
The novella is framed as a semi-journalistic investigation not into the murder or its motive, but into how it was that the crime was allowed to happen despite every opportunity having been given for its prevention. “There had never been a death more foretold,” the narrator says (50), as it is true that for hours in advance the crime had been announced by its own perpetrators. Through the investigation, it is determined that the Vicario twins had announced their plan so openly and so far in advance in the hopes of being stopped – their duty to their sister would be fulfilled simply by the attempt, but there was no true desire to kill Santiago Nasar. Unfortunately, since nobody intervened, the killing had to be carried out for the sake of their own and their sister’s honor, and they never regretted it. In fact, while most respected Santiago Nasar and did not want him dead, most also considered the murder a natural consequence and did not hold the Vicario twins accountable. They served three years in prison awaiting trial, but when they did go, they were let off on the verdict that the killing was a “legitimate defense of honor.”
However, this is not the reason that Santiago Nasar was not warned. In actuality, it was in part because very few people took the twins seriously, and those who did either assumed somebody else would do something, or were incompetent in their attempts to help. In the end, when Santiago finally learned of the threat to his life from the father of his fiancée, it was much too late. He ran out into the square, where the townspeople had gathered, finally having realized that the threat was serious. Many different people shouted things to him in an attempt to help, but they ended up disorienting him, and they all stood by as he was chased down and killed. It is learned somewhat late in the novella that, in fact, Santiago Nasar was almost definitely not the one who Angela Vicario had slept with, although she stood by the claim for many years. The narrator speculates that “Angela Vicario was protecting someone who really loved her, and she had chosen Santiago Nasar’s name because she thought her brothers would never dare go up against him” (90). From the very beginning nobody really expected the murder to happen, and because of this, it did.
This story is a particularly effective tragedy because its conclusion was so preventable, and so pointless. Santiago Nasar’s death was the result of the negligence of an entire community, and it achieved essentially nothing. On its surface, this is a wonderful illustration of the bystander effect, in which everyone assumes that the next person will help, and nobody ever does. However, one of the major themes of this work is the concept of honor. Santiago Nasar was killed in order to restore Angela Vicario’s honor, even though it would eventually come to be widely believed that he was not her true lover. Additionally, Angela Vicario was only rejected because the prior loss of her virginity had humiliated and dishonored her husband, even though he had heavily pressured and manipulated her into marrying him against her will to begin with. The concept of honor is deeply important to the characters of the story, so much so that murder can be excused in its defense, and a woman can be thrown out and beaten over it. By the end, the only one considered a pure victim by the general populace was Angela’s husband, who was by no means a good person. While the story can be read simply as a criticism of the community’s inaction, on deeper inspection I now see also it as a commentary on the cultural role of honor and pride, and how placing too much importance on these ideals can have terrible consequences.