Chronicle of Death Morality, Injustice,

Chronicle of Death

Morality, Injustice, and the Importance of Knowing: Themes in Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Ambiguity has become one of the hallmarks of the modern novel. Authors like Margaret Atwood and Tim O'Brien have made the fluid nature of truth in a work of fiction explicit through such means as completely unreliable narrators in the case of the former, and completely unreliable reality in the case of the latter. This extension of post-modernist doubt does an interesting thing in a work of fiction; though ultimately all meaning is considered arbitrary despite its apparent certainty, there is a concretely observable abstract meaning to be found in these works' attempts to undermine certainty. That is, when the reliability of the story being told is called into serious doubt, meaning does not simply disappear, but rather shifts from an attribute of the story to an attribute of the telling.

In few works is this concept more explicitly rendered than in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The facts of the plot are not under serious question here, but as the various perspectives and stories that make up this novel come together, it becomes clear that the true facts are few and far between. Santiago Nasar was murdered by Pedro and Pablo Viscario, that much is clear. It also seems clear that they did so believing he had taken their sister's virginity, and it is certain that they told many people of their plan shortly before it was carried out. The rest is left for the reader to guess; there are no other certainties of any real value to be found in the book. It is unclear whether or not Santiago had ever been with, let alone slept with, Angela Viscario, it is unclear that this would have been considered a just cause for his death, and it is unclear why the Viscario brothers were permitted to carry out the killing.

This last point is one of the most essential questions asked in the story. The twins tell there plans to everyone they encounter between the time they make their plan and the time they carry it out. Even the local authorities are informed, and the twins have their knives taken away in order to prevent violence, but they are not themselves restrained and simply get other knives, have them sharpened, and succeed in stabbing Santiago to death outside his home. Meanwhile, the many member of the town who have been told about the murderous plot, either by the Viscario brothers or by others who have already heard, claim to assume that the twins do not plan on carrying out the act. The real motivation behind the town's permitting of the murder to occur can never be explicitly known, but there are clues that the people of the town actually become consumed by their interest and disgust about the breach of morality that they fail to see the value and importance of one man's life.

The unreliability of the narrator makes this difficult to perceives at first. Within three pages, he offers two different conclusions bout what the people of the town were thinking. At first, he acknowledges that "many of those on the docks knew that [the twins] were going to kill Santiago Nasar" (Marquez 19). The narrator never attempts to provide an explanation of why these people wouldn't have stopped the brothers from carrying out their plan, however. Instead, he simply changes the amount of knowledge that the townspeople supposedly had: "The only thing they knew for sure was that Angelo Viscario's brothers were waiting for him to kill him (Marquez 21). This equivocation on the part of the narrator does more than introduce uncertainty; it gives he appearance of a cover-up.

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 pound of liver for the mayor's breakfast" (Marquez 53). He is doubtful, but he reports it to the police; he reports it to the police, but he still sharpens the twins' knives when they come back a second time. There is a vague sense of civic duty in the report, but a greater sense of curiosity and possibly even macabre justice in the butcher's actions. This is also shown by father Amador, who is asked to conduct the autopsy on Santiago: "My first thought was that it wasn't any business of mine but something for the civil authorities'"( Marquez 70). There is no real sense of responsibility here.

There is a sense that the town wanted to watch the drama play out, however; regardless of Santiago's guilt or innocence, the moral outrage that such a scandal would cause was a source of entertainment. In fact, Santiago and Angela may never have been together, and eventually "no one believed that it had really been Santiago Nasar [who had slept with Angela]. They belong to two completely different worlds. No one had ever seen them together, much less alone together" (Marquez 89-90). It was not even about a sense of moral outrage, then, but more a morbid curiosity and fascination with spectacle that led them to disregard the value of a man's life. This is why when Santiago "learned at the last moment that the Viscario brothers were waiting for him to kill him, his reaction was not one of panic...but rather the bewilderment of innocence" (Marquez 101).