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Chronicle of a Death Foretold

a
Dr John Dale
a
Faculty of Humanities , University of Technology Sydney , Sydney, NSW,
Australia
Published online: 19 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Dr John Dale (2008) Chronicle of a Death Foretold, New Writing: The International
Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 5:1, 27-34

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790720802237196

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 Chronicle of a Death Foretold
John Dale
Faculty of Humanities, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW,
Australia
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez uses the device of an un-
named shadowy narrator visiting the scene of a killing and beginning an
investigation into the past. From the beginning of the text, the author sets up a
dialogue between the past and the present. Garcı́a Márquez does not assert that
the truth exists objectively in the world and present a version of this reality to the
passive reader as fact. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold the narrator and reader are
forced to choose between contradictory versions of what constitutes the truth. His
narrator is not all-knowing, but a shadowy detective figure who actively invites
the reader’s participation in the detective process. Juxtaposing viewpoints, making
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the most of the uncertainties of memory, Garcı́a Márquez’s questioning narrator is

perfectly suited for a non-fiction narrative where the murderer or murderers are
unknown. Where the truth is not straightforward. Working quietly as a detective in
partnership with the reader he tries to reconstruct from the words and documents of
others a true fiction, of what ’really’ happened. For this work is an investigation not
only of the past and a small Colombian community, but also a work which explores
the dominant narrative in the lives of all human beings: the chronicle of a death that
cannot be escaped, and which will bring every individual narrative to an end.

doi: 10.1080/14790720802237196

Keywords: investigation, detective, uncertainties of memory, true fiction, death foretold

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez uses the device of an

un-named shadowy narrator visiting the scene of a killing and beginning an
investigation into the past. Unlike Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Chronicle of a
Death Foretold was not published as a factual work, though it was promoted by
the English publisher as a book-length reconstruction of a real event. Indeed,
Garcı́a Márquez (1983: 1) began his writing career as a journalist and the
lessons that he learnt from good journalism are evident in his first attention-
grabbing sentence: ‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got
up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.’
This announcement of the death at the beginning of the text calls to mind the
generic beginning of a detective novel (also Graham Greene’s (1970: 5) Brighton
Rock which begins, ‘Hale knew before he had been in Brighton three hours,
that they meant to murder him.’).
It comes as no surprise to learn that Garcı́a Márquez had a great interest in
the detective genre from an early age. In June 1950, Garcı́a Márquez published
in his regular newspaper column a police story (‘Cuentecillo policiaco’) that
imitated detective fiction: A woman discovers a corpse at her door. She claims
to have spoken with the man, Señor B, at five in the afternoon but according to
the doctor, Señor B had been dead for eight hours, since ten in the morning.

1479-0726/08/01 027-08 $20.00/0 – 2008 J. Dale

INT. J. FOR THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF CREATIVE WRITING Vol. 5, No. 1, 2008

27
 28 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

‘The police investigator, confronted with these grossly contradictory facts,

smokes three packets of cigarettes and drinks sixteen cups of black coffee. He
goes to bed thinking: ‘‘This cannot be. This only happens in detective stories’’’
(Williams, 1984: 141). As with Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Garcı́a Márquez’s
approach here is distant and playful. In October 1952 he published a more
serious exposition on detective fiction dealing with the enigmas of the genre
and examining the addiction (or vice) of reading detective fiction.
These novels, he suggested, are better studied by ‘literary detectives’ than
‘literary critics’, because they have an attraction which no academic can
explain. Garcı́a Márquez’s fascination with logic and rational process was
expressed in his observation that the enigma always destroys itself in detective
fiction, and it does so with something as simple and foolish as logic. In many
ways this is a weakness of the detective genre: that something inexplicable is
explained away rationally. Why so many detective novels end badly is because
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their writers strive to tie everything up neatly. Examining Sophocles’s Oedipus

Rex as one of two great exceptions to this rule, Garcı́a Márquez (1983: 142)
noted that this is the only example in detective literature where the detective,
after concluding his investigation, discovers that he himself is the assassin of
his father.
The author’s fascination with the genre lasted 30 years until the publication
of Chronicle. Garcı́a Márquez has stated that this novel is based on a real event
that took place in a town in Colombia: ‘I was staying very near the participants
in this drama at a time when I’d written several short stories’, Garcı́a Márquez
revealed in an interview, ‘but still hadn’t got my first novel published. I
realised that I’d got hold of some extremely important material, but my
mother knew about this and asked me not to write this book while some of
those involved were still alive, and then she told me their names. So I just kept
putting it off. There were times I thought the drama had ended, but it
continued to develop and things kept on happening. If I’d written it then, I’d
have left out a great amount of material which is essential to the under-
standing of the story’ (McGuirk, 1987: 170).
As with Capote’s In Cold Blood, the publication of Chronicle of a Death
Foretold brought a swarm of reporters flooding into the small town of Sucre to
assess the connection between the written work by a famous writer and the
real event. With its case-history format, convincing reportage-like details and
the manner in which the narrator as detective sifts through the recollections of
others to establish the truth, Chronicle of a Death Foretold has all the hallmarks
of a non-fiction narrative. Two million copies were sold in the Spanish-
speaking market and the book was translated into 30 languages. The Director
of the Colombian publishing house called Chronicle of a Death Foretold ‘the most
successful publication in history!’ (McGuirk, 1987: 176). At the author’s
request, the format of the book was light and easy for the reader; the large
lettering similar to that of a children’s story. Garcı́a Márquez also wanted it to
be economically priced in order to reach the maximum readership.
When asked if journalistic techniques were used in the novel, Garcı́a
Márquez replied, ‘I’ve used a reporting technique but nothing of the actual
drama or those taking part remains except the point of departure and
structure. The characters don’t appear under their real names nor does the
 Chronicle of a Death Foretold 29

description tally with the real place. It has been poetically transmuted. The
only ones who retain their real names are members of my family because
they’ve allowed me to do this. Of course, some of the characters are going to be
recognised, but what really interests me, and I believe this must also interest
the critics, is the comparison between reality and the literary work’ (McGuirk,
1987: 171).
Indeed the real event and the literary work were strikingly similar:
Fact

Miguel Reyes Palencia marries and discovers his wife is not a virgin. He
returns the bride, Margarita, to her parents after striking her and abusing
her verbally. His friends give him a knife to kill her with. He refuses but
offers her the knife to kill herself.
However, the girl is forced to name her lover, Cayetano Gentile
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Chimento, who is pursued and killed by her brother.

Garcı́a Márquez knows the protagonists. He does not himself witness the
events. He promises his mother not to publish while protagonists are
alive. He publishes Chronicle in 1981.

Fiction

Bayardo San Román marries and discovers his wife is not a virgin. He
returns the bride, Angela Vicario, to her mother’s home where her
mother, Pura, strikes her repeatedly.
However, the girl is forced to name her lover. She names Santiago Nasar,
who is pursued and eventually killed by her twin brothers, Pedro and
Pablo. The narrator knows the protagonists and attends the wedding
celebrations. He misses the actual crime because he is in the brothel of
Marı́a Alejandrina Cervantes. The narrator ‘pieces together’ various
eyewitness versions of the death of Santiago Nasar and interviews the
principal surviving protagonists.
The narrator constantly refers to his text as a ‘chronicle’. (McGuirk, 1987:
171
172)
Throughout the text Garcı́a Márquez uses the real names of his own wife,
Mercedes; his sister, Margot; his brother, Luis Enrique; and his mother, Luisa
Santiago. The un-named narrator ‘refers not only to Garcı́a Márquez’s family
as his own but also to Garcı́a Márquez’s fictional creations from other, earlier
novels, (including) One Hundred Years of Solitude. The crossing of networks
then, problematizes genre distinctions: autobiography, fiction and journalism.
It also highlights intertextuality: that is, the suggestion (beloved of Garcı́a
Márquez) that all his writing is but one text . . .’ (McGuirk, 1987: 173).
The generic ambiguity of the text also confirms Doctorow’s remark that
there is no longer any such thing as fiction or non-fiction, only narrative. ‘For
the first time I have managed a perfect integration of journalism and
literature’, Garcı́a Márquez revealed in an El Pais interview shortly after the
release of Chronicle. ‘Journalism helps maintain contact with reality, which is
 30 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

essential to literature. And vice-versa: literature teaches you how to write’

(McGuirk, 1987: 170).
When comparing the real event to the literary work, Garcı́a Márquez
maintained that although the starting point was the same, the development
was different. He believed that his polished version of the murder was an
improvement on reality. ‘I’m pretentious enough to believe that the ‘‘drama’’
in my book is better’, Garcı́a Márquez said, ‘that it’s more controlled, more
structured’ (Garcı́a Márquez quoted in McGuirk, 1987: 171).
By the very process of recording an event the author gives to that event a
temporal structure, and the manipulation of chronology with a real event is a
defining attribute of the creative non-fiction narrative. From the beginning of a
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the author sets up a dialogue between the past and
the present. The first two references to self on the part of the narrator in the
text are of different temporal orders: ‘I was recovering from the wedding
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revels in the apostolic lap of Marı́a Alejandrina Cervantes and I only

awakened with the clamour of the alarm bells’ (Garcı́a Márquez, 1983: 3)
refers to the narrator at the time of the murder. ‘When I returned to this
forgotten village trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together
from so many scattered shards’ (p. 5) refers to the construction of the present
narration some 27 years later. Contradictions between past and present are
explored: ‘Victoria Guzmán for her part was categorical with her answer that
neither she nor her daughter knew that they were waiting for Santiago Nasar
to kill him. But in the course of her years she admitted that they both knew it
when he came into the kitchen’ (p. 11). The narrator also uses hindsight and
irony to reflect upon the past: ‘‘‘I don’t want any flowers at my funeral,’’
Santiago Nasar told me, not thinking that I would see to it that there weren’t
any the next day’ (p. 42).
Garcı́a Márquez does not assert that the truth exists objectively in the world
and present a version of this reality to the passive reader as fact. In Chronicle of
a Death Foretold the narrator and reader are forced to choose between
contradictory versions of what constitutes the truth. His narrator is not all-
knowing, this shadowy detective figure appears actively to invite the reader’s
participation in the detective process. Juxtaposing viewpoints, making the
most of the uncertainties of other characters’ memories, Garcı́a Márquez’s
questioning narrator is perfectly suited for a non-fiction narrative where the
murderer or murderers are unknown. Where the truth is not straightforward
and where the narrator can never be in a position to know everything. The
narrator descends into the text and looks and listens and asks questions.
Working quietly as a detective in partnership with the reader he tries to
reconstruct from the words and documents of others ‘a true fiction, i.e., an
account of what ‘‘really’’ happened’ (Marcus, 1974: xx). He probes through the
mists of half-accurate memories, equivocations and contradictory versions.
‘This hesitancy, this abdication of Olympus’, as Salman Rushdie has written of
Garcı́a Márquez’s book, ‘is put to special use’ (Rushdie in Garcı́a Márquez,
1983: 124).
The importance of memory in a non-fiction narrative cannot be overstated
and Garcı́a Márquez makes constant and playful reference in the early pages
of Chronicle of a Death Foretold to the way the narrative is constructed from the
 Chronicle of a Death Foretold 31

memory of others: ‘The narrator-detective’s total record of his chronicle

consists of nine citations from the written record and a total of 102 quotations
from the thirty-seven characters who contribute to this ‘‘chronicle’’ of the
narrator-investigator’ (Williams, 1984: 137). Technically speaking, the most
authoritative voice in the text is that of Angela Vicario who is directly quoted
twelve times. ‘The narrator thus gives precedence, ironically to the version of
the story given by precisely the person investigated. In the end, there is neither
a historian nor an authoritative voice in the text: the concept of authority itself
becomes enigmatic’ (Williams, 1984: 137).
In the opening pages Santiago Nasar’s mother tells the narrator how she
urged her son to take an umbrella with him on his last day alive: ‘The only
thing that interested her was for her son not to get soaked in the rain, since
she’d heard him sneeze while he was sleeping’ (Garcı́a Márquez, 1983: 7). But
in the very next paragraph, Victoria Guzmán, the cook, assures the narrator
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that it hadn’t rained. ‘On the contrary, she told me when I came to see her, a
short time before her death. The sun warms things up earlier than in August’
(p. 7). Further on in the text another character is just as adamant about the
weather on that fatal day: ‘I can remember with certainty that it was almost
five o’clock and it was beginning to rain,’ Colonel Lázaro Aponte told me
(p. 56). And later: ‘Of course it wasn’t raining, Cristo Bedoya told me. It was
just going on seven and a golden sun was already coming through the
windows’ (p. 106).
If these characters are unable to agree on the weather, the author appears to
be saying, then how can they be relied on to agree on the more crucial details
of a murder. The truth is no more accurate than other people’s recollections.
Garcı́a Márquez’s narrative continually demonstrates the unreliability of
memory when trying to chronicle a real or ‘fictional’ event. No sooner has
the narrator crossed the threshold of the murdered man’s mother’s house than
she confuses him with the memory of her son. ‘I saw him in her memory. He
had turned twenty one the last week in January and he was slim and pale and
had his father’s Arab eyelids and curly hair’ (p. 5).
Throughout the text references to memory abound including the wonderful
line that best summarises the role of the narrator: ‘I had a very confused
memory of the festival before I decided to rescue it piece by piece from the
memory of others’ (p. 43). Gass (quoted in McGuirk & Cardwell, 1987: 166) has
remarked that Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not tell, ‘but literally pieces
together the torn apart body of a story’.
For this work is an investigation not only of the past and a small Colombian
community, of its religion and culture, but also an investigation of death.
Chronicle begins and ends with death. And as one Garcı́a Márquez scholar has
pointed out: ‘One of the most consistent themes in Garcı́a Márquez’s fiction
and journalism is death’ (Williams, 1984: 146).
Chronicle manifests many aspects of the detective genre but unlike the
traditional detective story, it openly reveals the victim, criminals and motive in
the first twenty pages. ‘Instead of the syntagmatic progression associated with
the detective genre which its subject matter evokes, namely Todorov’s classic
typology of enigma
pursuit
solution, Chronicle depends, rather, on an
associative structure, again in Saussurean terms, in its generation of meaning.
 32 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

Thus drawing for a moment on Roland Barthes, the hermeneutic (enigma) and
the proaretic (action) codes, since they involve the apparatus of resolving a
given sequence of actions, may be construed, here, as misleading the reader into
identifying the utterance of Chronicle with the language of detective-fiction’
(Williams, 1984: 175).
In a detective novel the mystery is who did it? In true crime fiction all too
frequently it is why was it done? In Chronicle the mystery lies elsewhere. There
is the question of how the murder was carried out and it is true the vivid
depiction of Santiago Nasar’s death is the last scene in the book, but as
Williams (1984): 154) wrote,
‘the last pages of the novel constitute a thoroughly anticlimactic
moment. All its circumstances and gruesome particulars are thoroughly
known at that juncture; we anticipate and recognize each thrust of the
murderers’ knives, since they and the damage inflicted by them were
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first inscribed in the autopsy report before they ever scarred the body of
Santiago Nasar.
Autopsy

Seven of the several wounds were fatal. The liver was almost sliced in
pieces by two deep cuts on the anterior side. He had four incisions in the
stomach, one of them so deep that it went completely through and
destroyed the pancreas. He had six other lesser perforations in the
transverse colon and multiple wounds in the small intestine. The only
one he had in the back, at the level of the third lumbar vertebra, had
perforated the right kidney . . . the thoracic cavity showed two perfora-
tions: one in the second rib space that reached the lung, and another
quite close to the left armpit. He had six minor wounds on his arms and
hands, and two horizontal slashes: one on the right thigh . . . . (Garcı́a
Márquez, 1983: 75
76)
Dramatised Scene

The knife went through the palm of his right hand and then sank into his
side up to the hilt . . . Pedro Vicario pulled out his knife with his
slaughterer’s iron wrist and dealt him a second thrust in the same
place . . . Santiago Nasar twisted after the third stab . . . and tried to turn
his back to them. Pablo Vicario, who was on his left with the curved
knife, then gave him the only stab in the back . . . Trying to finish the task
once and for all, Pedro Vicario sought his heart, but he looked for it
almost in the armpit, where pigs have it . . . Desperate, Pablo Vicario
gave him a horizontal slash on the abdomen, and all intestines exploded
out. Pedro Vicario was about to do the same, but his wrist twisted with
horror and he gave him a wild cut on the thigh . . . . (Garcı́a Márquez,
1983: 119
121)
This repetition is what deprives the murder scene of its ghastly impact. ‘At the
same time, the detachment that it produces renders it impossible not to notice
the painstaking manner in which the description endeavours to account for
 Chronicle of a Death Foretold 33

each of the blows that had been previously detailed in the post-mortem
examination’ (Alonso, 1987: 154). No doubt the sense of foreknowledge
surrounding the events leading to the death of Santiago Nasar is deliberately
incorporated into the narrative so that the reader is forewarned of the murder
before it occurs in the text.
Time and time again the narrator establishes his relationship to the
community at large and to the main protagonists of the plot
Santiago Nasar
and Angela, Pedro and Pablo Vicario. But we learn little of the narrator’s
person, other than he retreats on the night of the murder into the lap of Marı́a
Alejandrina Cervantes in the town’s busy brothel. ‘It was she who did away
with my generation’s virginity. She taught us much more than we should have
learned, but she taught us above all that there’s no place in life sadder than an
empty bed’ (Garcı́a Márquez, 1983: 65).
Nor do we learn of the narrator’s motivations for trying after so many years
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to piece together the story of this murder.

The investigative framework of Chronicle of a Death Foretold seems to imply
by the narrator’s returning to this small town that his investigation of the
crime will uncover some undiscovered clue or secret that will restore
coherence to those events that occurred 27 years ago. Yet, after all the
interviews, the corroborations and the meticulous research, the narrator
cannot produce any new concrete facts on the circumstances that determined
the death of Santiago Nasar.
Indeed, when considered in the light of the original official investigation,
there seems no justification for the narrator’s report on his new inquest
since it repeats the failure of the preceding one. If he manages not to fall
prey to the despondence and frustration that were repeatedly expressed
by the civil magistrate in his report, the result is yet the same: the
intervening years have not disentangled the ciphered knot around which
the narrator weaves the weft of his own interpretative enterprise.
(Alonso, 1987: 152)
Williams (1984: 139) wrote, ‘With this novel Garcı́a Márquez attains the
perfect symbiosis of the writer-as-novelist and the writer-as-journalist’, and
although ostensibly Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the most ‘fictional’ of the
texts examined here, it is in many ways more perplexing than Capote’s non-
fiction narrative in its blurring of the distinctions between fact and fiction, as
well as in its complex temporal structure and lack of closure. There are no
revelations or new evidence and the one important mystery that is implied in
the text
the possibility that Santiago Nasar is innocent of the deflowering of
Angela Vicario
is never confirmed. Angel Rama has even postulated that the
narrator himself may be responsible for Angela Vicario’s dishonour (Alonso,
1987: 164).
What alarms the investigating magistrate most is the fact that he could not
find a single indication that Santiago Nasar had been the cause of the wrong.
Angela Vicario plucks his name out of the air: ‘She looked for it in the
shadows, she found it at first sight among the many, many easily confused
names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall with her
 34 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has already been
written. ‘‘Santiago Nasar,’’ she said’ (Garcı́a Márquez, 1983: 47).
The murdered man’s reaction to the news that the Vicario brothers are
going to kill him is not one of panic, but rather the bewilderment of innocence.
‘My personal impression is that he died without understanding his death’, the
narrator writes obliquely (p. 102). The narrator has done his best as detective,
but in the end it is uncertainty and ambiguity that linger in the memories of
the characters and in the mind of the reader.
Garcı́a Márquez’s narrator is not overly concerned with investigating his
small community as he knows most of the characters intimately including his
mother, his sister, his future wife and even the madam of the town’s brothel
with whom he spends the night of the murder. Nor does the narrator as
detective seek out the who, why and how, as those three questions are already
answered at the beginning of the text.
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Garcı́a Márquez’s narrator uses the murder of Santiago Nasar as a vehicle to

explore the past, as an investigation of memory and the South American sense
of honour, and the narration of death: ‘The Passion, of a banal Nasar-ene. In the
dramatic set-piece of pinning against wood, the end announced throughout
the text which everyone knows, which no-one prevents, which, retrospectively
and by piecing together conflicting versions, everyone would mythologise,
reliving, exaggerating and exulting in their own part
Chronicle rewrites
another chronicle: the dominant chronicle of Spanish American consciousness’
(McGuirk, 1987: 187). As one critic has observed, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is
a story that deconstructs a version of the New Testament.
However, it is also a work which explores the dominant narrative in the
lives of all human beings: the chronicle of a death that cannot be escaped, of an
event that everyone knows is coming and which will bring every individual
story to an end.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to John Dale, Faculty of
Humanities, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW
2007, Australia (John.Dale@uts.edu.au).

References
Alonso, C. (1987) Writing and ritual in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In B. McGuirk and R.
Cardwell (eds) Gabriel Garcı´a Márquez: New Readings (pp. 151
169). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Garcı́a Márquez, G. (1983) Chronicle of a Death Foretold (G. Rabassa, trans.). London:
Picador.
Greene, G. (1970) Brighton Rock. London: Penguin.
Marcus, S. (ed.) (1974) Dashiell Hammett: The Continental Op. New York: Random House.
McGuirk, B. and Cardwell, R. (eds) (1987) Gabriel Garcı´a Márquez: New Readings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McGuirk, B. (1987) Free-play of fore-play: The fiction of non-consummation: Specula-
tions on Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In B. McGuirk and R. Cardwell (eds) Gabriel
Garcia Marquez: New Readings (pp. 169
189). Cambridge: CUP.
Williams, R.L. (1984) Gabriel Garcı´a Márquez. Boston: Twayne Publishers.