Morality, Injustice, and Truth 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 — the former through a completely unreliable narrator, the latter through a completely unreliable reality. This extension of postmodernist doubt does an interesting thing in a work of fiction: though all meaning may seem 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 García Márquez'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 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 raised by the story. The twins tell their plans to everyone they encounter between the time they make their decision 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. They simply acquire other knives, have them sharpened, and succeed in stabbing Santiago to death outside his home. Meanwhile, the many members of the town who have been told about the murderous plot — either by the Viscario brothers or by others who had already heard — claim to have assumed that the twins did not actually plan to carry out the act.

The real motivation behind the town's permitting of the murder can never be explicitly known, but there are clues suggesting that the people of the town became so consumed by their interest in, and disgust about, the alleged breach of morality that they failed to see the value and importance of one man's life.

The unreliability of the narrator makes this difficult to perceive at first. Within three pages, he offers two different conclusions about 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" (Márquez 19). The narrator never attempts to provide an explanation of why these people would not have stopped the brothers from carrying out their plan, however. Instead, he simply revises the amount of knowledge the townspeople supposedly had: "The only thing they knew for sure was that Angela Viscario's brothers were waiting for him to kill him" (Márquez 21). This equivocation on the part of the narrator does more than introduce uncertainty — it gives the 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" (Márquez 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 return 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 moral ambivalence is also reflected in the behavior of 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" (Márquez 70). There is no real sense of personal responsibility here. The pattern across multiple characters — the butcher, the policeman, the priest — suggests a collective abdication of moral agency that enables the crime to unfold.