Knowledge and Time in García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold
BY JACQUELINE WEAVER
In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the unnamed narrator sets out in a pursuit to compile the remaining pieces of truth surrounding the murder of Santiago Nasar, twenty-seven years after the event. As the narrator recounts a series of facts relating to Santiago’s death, however, the reader becomes aware of the futility of this effort, as the collection of past information cannot encompass or recreate the experience itself. Evaluating both the narrator’s desire to revisit the past and the foretold events leading up to Santiago’s death, the narrative explores the ways in which the past and the future impose upon present existence and assign meaning to the individual’s experience. In addition, as the narrator uses the form of a chronicle to organize time into a confined segment, he engages in an historical inquiry of both the murder of Santiago and the nature of time itself. Through the chronicle’s limited ability to account for the impositions of past and future, time emerges as an entity that resists and calls into question this linear segmentation constructed by human beings. However, where some critics might interpret this imposition of the past and future to be an indication of predetermination, García Márquez’s Chronicle maintains the notion of personal agency through its depiction of Angela’s letter-writing, which affirms the authority of the present and reassigns meaning to the past and future in the same non-linear fashion.
Valley Humanities Review Spring 2013
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Fascinated by a murder that occurred in his town nearly three decades previous, the narrator continues to pursue the truth surrounding Santiago’s death out of the desire to reconstruct and secure the past. While his primary motivation for this pursuit seems to be a curiosity over the town’s awareness of the approaching murder, the narrator also suggests that he finds...