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.. 'The only thing I prayed to God was to give me the courage to kill myself,' Angela Vicario told me. 'But he didn't give it to me (Marquez 41-42).
Again, as with the men in the story, women place honor as more important that life. Pura Vicario does all that she can to preserve her daughter's honor, just as her sons will do all they can to restore it. Since she did not gather the strength to restore her family's honor through committing suicide, Angela sought out other ways to hide her lost honor. Friends "taught her old wives' tricks to feign her lost possession, so that on her first morning as a newlywed she could display open under the sun in the courtyard of her house the linen sheet with the stain of honor" (Marquez 42). Using the words "possession" and "lost" is terms of Angela's virginity implies that it can be recovered, just like the honor that is said to be recovered after Santiago's murder.
The men and women in the story are fulfilling their own sense of honor based on socially learned ideals. "The lawyer stood by the thesis of homicide in legitimate defense of honor, which was upheld by the court in good faith" (55). Despite the illegality of murder, it is socially acceptable even to the lawyer and court when it is done to preserve family honor. Preserving as well as respecting a code...
This action was brought on by a woman's lost honor. It was avenged by men who wanted to restore that honor. Additionally, the community did not act as it would have in most murders because it valued the avenging of lost honor. Through the mentioning of honor throughout the text, it is clear that the male and female characters, as well as the overall community, of "A Chronicle of a Death Foretold" act on honor and set the entire story in action.
Further investigation into the social conception of honor may bring to light additional insight into the community's actions. How does an entire community become so focused on honor that they can look the other way or explain the actions of the Vicario brothers as warranted? Looking into these issues would help those readers who come from a vastly different social structure appreciate how socially imposed pressures can change the outcomes of individual lives, both in stories and in real life.
Works Cited
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Boston: Vintage, 2003.
Works Cited
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Boston: Vintage, 2003.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is set in a small Columbian town. The novel revolves around the murder of Santiago Nasser for the defilement of Angela Vicarico. The importance of honor to the culture depicted in the novel is evident throughout the story. Santiago's murder is motivated and justified by honor. Honor has different values and meaning in the context of different cultures. In Chronicle of
One critic note the long-term change in Angela, stating that "she undergoes an extraordinary conversion and discovers in herself a love for Bayardo San Roman as tremendous and inexplicable as his for her" (Michaels para. 5). This change in Angela has to be as much a surprise to her as it is to Bayardo and the reader, but again, her choices are limited. Other females in the community have been
Even the requirement that Angela be a virgin on her wedding night is tied to the Church, where priests never marry and so supposedly are virgins, and good Catholic girls must be virgins when they marry. In addition, throughout the novel, the murder, and the events leading up to it are often referred to as being "God's will," which indicates how the Church permeates everyday life. The narrator's mother
This appearance does not improve as the book progresses. Because their first set of knives is taken away, the twins go to the butcher Faustino Santos twice to have knives sharpened for the murder. In piecing together the story later on, the narrator says, "Faustino Santos told me that he'd still been doubtful, and that he reported it to a policeman who came by a little later to buy a
Angela knows she cannot change this social perception of gender roles, and gives the first name that comes to mind because she realizes that she is in the position of sentencing that man to death, and probably tries to save the man who had actually dishonored her. Guilt is a major theme in the novel, and is closely linked to the theme of fate. In fact, this inextricable link explains
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis both place the protagonist in opposition to a prevailing family structure. At the same time, the family structure dictates personal identity, character traits, worldviews, and reactions to events. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold and in The Metamorphosis, personal identities are malleable and yet the changes that occur take place within a confining social structure at which