Literary Analysis of Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Narrative Techniques
Stage where the work is written:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), by Gabriel García Márquez, is a short novel that blends journalistic chronicle with novelistic storytelling. It covers one hour, but refers to the children of the subjects and their incipient old age. It represents the culmination of a period of renewal (departure from the traditional form of narrative, interior monologue, jumps in space and time, irrational and dreamlike elements, from surrealism).
García Márquez’s Idea of the Novel
Gabriel García Márquez incorporates innovative features into the novel.
The most significant characteristics of the new Latin American novel, from the 1960s (the Latin American Boom), are summarized as follows:
- Magical Realism: Characterized by the use of magic, dreams, and fantasy, experimenting with new narrative techniques and finding extraordinary elements in everyday life.
- Incorporation of the Subconscious: Dreams play a crucial role in expressing the subconscious. This necessitates the use of interior monologue.
- Presence of Death: Death appears as a core or central idea. It highlights the transience of earthly things while simultaneously emphasizing the value of life.
- Legendary-Allegorical Themes: Elements from traditional storytelling captivate the reader, creating a narrative that oscillates between the possible and the improbable.
- Narrative Technique Renewal – Subjectivism: The narrator can be the protagonist, a witness, or a secondary character.
- Illogicality: Irrationalism becomes an attribute of the novel. Coherence and clarity are diminished in favor of a bitter truth about humanity.
- Sacred Sense of the Body: Sex is shown without inhibitions, to ward off human loneliness.
- Rupture of Linear Time: Chronological time is supplanted by psychic time, measured only by moments of distress or happiness, fragmented narrative on several levels.
The narrator’s time encompasses the period between the story being told and the act of narrating it. Story time is when the events occur, and narrative time is how the narrator presents the action. Flashback or analepsis narrative. Prolepsis narrative. Narrative techniques: Rich language, syntactic and lexical changes, local vocabulary. Mixture of linguistic registers. Use of dialogue. Literary devices: hyperbole, repetition, metaphors. Reality: Choosing the extraordinary. Magical realism is exaggerated.
Plot and Background
The novel is based on a true story that happened in the writer’s native country when he was a boy. It recounts, in the form of a journalistic chronicle, Santiago Nasar’s murder at the hands of the Vicario brothers, who seek to cleanse the honor of their sister and family, as if it were a drama by Lope de Vega or Calderón.
This event forever changes the lives and consciousness of the town’s inhabitants, so much so that, twenty years later, the narrator feels the need to reconstruct the events, piecing together “the broken mirror of memory.”
The title refers to the journalistic genre of the chronicle, as the narrator acts as a reporter sent to the scene to investigate and reconstruct it. He conducts interviews, examines court documents, and reviews the autopsy. The author transforms Santiago Nasar’s dramatic death into a legend, a mythical, wholly literary event.
Structure and Narrator
a) Structure: The novel has a circular structure; it begins when the protagonist is dead and ends when he dies, but the story of the massacre is not resolved until the end.
Narrator: The narrator is multifaceted: a secondary character, the author, a friend of S. Nasar, who presents the facts in the first person. Family and even his future wife will appear throughout the pages. At other times, it is a third-person narrator, who writes a chronicle based on the information gathered. It also shows the omniscience of some people who know the thoughts of others and the people themselves, who play a role in relating events to the judge and the narrator. The interior monologue of some characters reflects the subconscious, allowing the reader to understand their situation or perspective on the events.