1. Characters
Santiago Nasar - The protagonist of the story. He is killed the day after Angela Vicario's wedding.
Angela Vicario - The dishonored bride. She becomes a seamstress after being returned home on her
wedding night. She was very beautiful in her youth.
Pedro Vicario - The more serious of the two twins. It is his idea to kill Santiago Nasar. He spent time in the
army, and after being released from prison he joins the army once again.
Pablo Vicario - He is the twin who insists that the twins go through with the crime. He is betrothed to
Prudencia Cotes, who he marries when he is released from jail.
Bayardo San Roman - The man who marries Angela Vicario. He comes from a wealthy and prestigious
family. When he arrives in town, he is described as having a slim waist and golden eyes.
Purisima del Carmen - The mother of Angela Vicario. When her daughter is brought home by Bayardo San
Roman, after he discovers she is not a virgin, Purisima beats her daughter; she is a strict mother.
Poncio Vicario - He is Angela's father. He used to work as a goldsmith until the strain of the profession made
him go blind. He dies shortly after his twin sons are sent to prison.
Placida Linero - Santiago's mother. She has a well-earned reputation as an interpreter of dreams. She never
forgives herself for misinterpreting the dream about trees and birds that her son had the night before his death.
Maria Alejandrina Cervantes - An elegant whore with eyes like an "insomniac leopard." She eats excessively
to mourn Santiago Nasar's death.
Prudencia Cotes - Pablo Vicario's finance. She says she would not have married Pablo if he had not upheld
the honor of his sister by killing the man who took her virginity.
Ibrahim Nasar - Santiago's father, an Arab. He seduced Victoria Guzman when she was a teenager. He
taught his son the art of falconry and his love of firearms.
Victoria Guzman - TheNasars' cook. She violently guts rabbits on the morning of the murder. She had an
affair with Ibrahim Nasar when she was a teenager.
ClothildeArmenta - The proprietress of the milk shop where the Vicarios wait to kill Santiago. She is an
insightful woman, and can tell that the Vicario twins are tired and are killing Santiago only out of obligation.
Don Rogelio de la Flor - ClothildeArmenta's husband. He doesn't listen to her when she warns him about the
Vicario twins' plan. He dies of shock at age eighty-six when he sees the brutal way that the Vicarios murder
Santiago.
DivinaFlor - Victoria Guzman's daughter. Santiago desires her sexually, but Victoria watches carefully to
make sure he does not do anything to her.
Margot - The narrator's sister. She feels that Santiago Nasar would be a good catch for any girl, since he is
young, handsome, and wealthy.
Cristo Bedoya - A friend of the narrator's and of Santiago Nasar. He runs all over town at the end of the book
trying to warn Santiago of the Vicario's plan.
Luis Enrique - The narrator's younger brother. He plays the guitar very well, and goes around with Santiago,
Cristo, and the narrator when they go to serenade Bayardo and Angela on the night of their wedding.
Father Amador - The local priest, who forgets to warn Santiago Nasar about the plot against him.
Colonel Lazaro Aponte - The lazy Colonel who fails to prevent Santiago's murder because he is checking on
his game of dominoes.

2. Faustino Santos - The local butcher who alerts a local police officer that the Vicario brothers are talking about
murdering Santiago.
General Petronio San Roman and Alberta Simonds - Bayardo San Roman's parents. Alberta Simonds
used to be the extremely beautiful; General Petronio San Roman and she drive up in a model T Ford. The
General is impressively bedecked with war medals.
YamilShaium - An Arab man who warns Cristo Bedoya about the Viacrio twins' plan to murder Santiago. He
and Santiago have an Arabic play on words that they exchange whenever they meet.
Flora Miguel - The pretty, but uninteresting woman that Santiago Nasar was betrothed to marry.
Nahir Miguel - The father of Flora Miguel. He is the one who warns Santiago that the Vicario brothers are
waiting to kill him.
Xius - A widower who owned the most beautiful house; he died of sadness because he sold it; the house held
all of his dead wife's possessions.
Mercedes Barcha - The narrator's eventual wife (and the name of Gabriel GarcíaMárquez's real wife). The
narrator proposes to her at Angela and Bayardo'swddiing party.
Main Character Analysis
Santiago Nasar
Although much of the narrative is focused on him, Santiago Nasar remains a mystery throughout much of the
novel. We are told that he was a child of a marriage of convenience and that he is open hearted. His
appreciation of valor, prudence, firearms, and falconry, comes from his father, who is no longer alive. We also
know that Santiago, had he lived longer, probably would have seduced DivinaFlor, just as his father seduced
her mother, Victoria Guzman. The narrator gives us somewhat random, fragmentary information with which to
piece Santiago together.
The narrative never explains any ambitions Santiago may have had, what motivated him to do things, or
whether or not he actually loved his fiancée. The narrator's sister, Margot, tells us that he is handsome and
rich, but we are never shown more that these facile, superficial traits. The reader learns that Santiago Nasar
frequently dreams about trees, or birds in trees, and that he wakes up with a headache, but we don't know
what he dreamed about when he was awake. The narrator seems so focused on collecting others' views of the
day of the murder that the narrative neglects to give the reader a comprehensive picture of the victim of the
crime.
The narrator strongly implies that Santiago was innocent of the crime, and it does seem clear by Santiago's
confused words right before his death that he had no idea what he was being killed for. That he was never
seen with Angela Vicario also points to his innocence. But on the other hand, the reader knows that he would
have had sex with DivinaFlor if given the opportunity, so it is not entirely clear that he would not have been
inclined to do so with Angela Vicario if given an opportunity.

3. Angela Vicario
Angela Vicario is in many ways the main character of the story. She is the most quoted character in the novel,
and has the strongest narrative voice. In addition, she is center of the mystery that the narrator is trying to
unravel, since she is the only one who knows whether or not Santiago was truly the one who took her virginity,
and she remains enigmatic at the end of the story because she never reveals whether or not he was guilty.
Angela Vicario is a distant cousin of the narrator. As a young girl, she was the most beautiful of her four sisters.
However, the narrator says she had a "helpless air and a poverty of spirit that augured an uncertain future for
her." She used to sit in the window of her house, making cloth flowers, and the narrator thought she looked
more and more destitute every year. He says that her "penury of spirit had been aggravated by the years," so
much so that when people discovered that Bayardo San Roman wanted to marry her, they thought it was an
outsider's plan.
Angela says she did not wish to marry him because he seemed like too much of a man for her. She thought he
was stuck up, and that he was a Polack. She also felt that he did not court her, but merely ingratiated himself
with her family, and that also irritated her. However, her parents would hear none of her objections; her mother
told her that love could be learned.
Her mother appears to have been right, though not in the sense that either she or Angela expected—Angela
fell in love with Bayardo San Roman after he returned her to her house. When the narrator went to visit her
years later, she answered all his questions "with very good judgment and a sense of humor." He says that "she
was so mature and witty that it was difficult to believe that she was the same person." When he asks he once
again if Santiago Nasar was the guilty party who had taken her virginity, she replied, "Don't beat it to death,
cousin. He was the one."
Her inexplicable obsession with Bayardo San Roman takes the form of a ritual: she begins writing letters to
him, and it becomes a weekly habit of hers for seventeen years. The fact that he ultimately returns to her is no
stranger than the act of writing a letter a week to someone who does not respond. Because he does come back
to her, Angela Vicario triumphs in a sense-she has found the resolution she desired in her life. However, the
conclusion of her love affair with Bayardo does not shed any light on the murder of Santiago Nasar-in terms of
him, she would never say anything save to name him as the one who took her virginity. Though she seems like
an honest person, it is difficult to tell whether she would have been willing to reveal the name of the man who
truly took her virginity, especially if she still had feelings for him.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
Ritual
Manifestations of love in Chronicle of a Death Foretold are ritualistic, and the novel itself is a ritual which re-
enacts Santiago Nasar's death. When Bayardo San Roman first comes to town, he decides to marry Angela
Vicario, whom he has never met. His courtship of Angela demonstrates the rituals of Latin American marriage

4. culture. He brings her a gift of a music box inlaid with mother-of-pearl for her birthday, and obtains everything
his future bride asks for. The purpose of this courtship ritual is not to cause the lovers to fall deeper in love but
rather to demonstrate the man's affluence and power. Personality does not determine worthiness; rather, their
family and wealth do.
Angela Vicario's obsessive letter writing is another example of ritual. Angela does not care what she says in her
letters; she is more concerned with the fact that Bayardo is receiving them. The ritual of writing brings her
happiness. Similarly, Bayardo San Roman does not read her letters, but receiving two thousand letters over the
course of seventeen years gives him the certainty that she is serious in her desire for him to return to her.
The novel's style is itself a ritual repetition of the events surrounding a crime. It does not follow a traditional
narrative arc, but rather is told for the cathartic value of the act of telling. The only thing we gain from reading
the story is the same limited knowledge of the occurrence that is available to the narrator. In this sense, the
novel can be seen as a mere ritual of investigation as an end in itself with no other results or discoveries.
Honor
In the culture of the Colombian town in which the narrative takes place, honor is taken very seriously. Nobody
in the novel ever questions any action that is taken to preserve someone's honor, since it is commonly believed
to be a fundamental moral trait that is vital to keep intact. A person without honor is an outcast in the
community.
All of the characters in the novel are influenced by this powerful construction of honor. The defense of this ideal
is directly responsible for Santiago Nasar's murder. The Vicario brothers kill Santiago in order to restore the
honor of their sister. She dishonors her family by marrying another man when she had already slept with
someone else. In order for this wrong to be righted, her brothers must kill Santiago, the man who supposedly
took her virginity, in order to clear her name. Though a few people in the community, like ClothildeArmenta and
YamilShaium, try to prevent the death from occurring, most people turned the other cheek, because they
believed that the severity of the crime deserved a cruel punishment. The fact that death was considered a
reasonable retribution for the crime of taking a girl's virginity indicates how awful it was to sleep with an
unmarried woman; doing so ruined her chances of marrying well, and marriage was women's one way to
advance in the world.
Motifs
Magical Realism
Gabriel GarcíaMárquez repeatedly uses strange, surreal details to highlight otherwise ordinary events. One
instance of this is his description of the local brothel, which sounds so nice that the reader at first has trouble
discerning what exactly Maria Alejandrina Cervantes does—though she is a whore, the description of her
house is so beautiful that if one were to gloss over the description, they might perceive her house as an elegant
domicile.
Márquez uses magical realism in Chronicle of a Death Foretold to illustrate untrustworthy digressions or details
about characters that are not at all essential to the plot, though they are interesting. In the opening of the book,
the narrator discusses the dream that Santiago Nasar has right before his death: "He'd dreamed he was going

5. through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his
dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit." This whimsical sort of detail works
against the journalistic investigative style of the narrative, and sends the reader into several different
conceptual areas between reality and fiction that he then has to disentangle.
Symbols
We learn that both the narrator's and Santiago Nasar's mothers interpret symbols from dreams, but the overall
importance or significance of symbols in the novel is never clearly linked to any other concept or idea that
informs the work as a whole. This is especially true because the work is supposed to be journalistic and factual,
so any such symbols work against the narrator's purported intent of clarifying the events surrounding Santiago
Nasar's death, becoming purely anecdotal. Because they occur randomly, constantly, and without any easily
discernible premeditated purpose, it is difficult to distinguish any recurring symbol that has a greater
significance in the text as a whole.
Chapter 1
Summary
On the day he is eventually killed, Santiago Nasar wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to wait for the boat which is bringing
the bishop. The night before, he had dreamt about trees. He woke up with a headache. Some people
remember that the weather was cloudy that morning, others that it was fine, but all recall that Santiago was in a
very good mood. The narrator, lying in the lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, was wakened by the clamor of
alarm bells.
Santiago is wearing a shirt and pants of white linen exactly like the ones he had worn to the wedding the day
before. Santiago goes to the house of his mother, Placida Linero, to get an aspirin for his headache.
Santiago is slim and pale, with Arab eyes and curly hair. He is the only child of a marriage of convenience. He
inherited his sixth sense from his mother. From his father, Ibrahim Nasar, he learned his love of firearms,
horses, and falconry, as well as the qualities of valor and carefulness. He and his father spoke Arabic with each
other. After his father died, Santiago abandoned his studies at the end of secondary school in order to take
over the family ranch.
Victoria Guzman is sure that it did not rain on the day of Santiago's death. She recalls that she had been in the
kitchen, quartering rabbits for lunch, when Santiago came in. DivinaFlor, her daughter, had served Santiago a
mug of coffee with a shot of cane liquor, as she did every Monday. When she came again to take the mug
away, he grabbed her arm and said, "The time has come for you to be tamed." Victoria Guzman says that she
will never be tamed while she is alive. She was seduced by Ibrahim Nasar, Santiago's father, when she was an
adolescent. Both women had heard that Santiago was going to be killed, but neither was certain whether or not
the rumor was true.

6. The whole house is awakened by the bellow of the bishop's steamboat. DivinaFlor leads Santiago to the front
door. Even though the front door is usually closed and barred, Santiago always uses that door when he is
dressed up. Divina remembers that when he went out the door, the boat stopped tooting and the cocks began
to crow. There is an envelope under the door warning Santiago that someone is waiting for him to kill him, but it
isn't found until long after Santiago's death.
As everyone makes their way toward the bishop's boat, the two men who are waiting to kill Santiago, Pedro
Vicario and Pablo Vicario are waiting at the local milk shop, the only place that is open at that hour. They are
still wearing their dark wedding suits, and holding knives wrapped in newspaper.
Though everyone has amassed roosters and firewood to give to the bishop, Father Carmen Amador, he never
gets off the boat-he just stands on the upper deck and crosses himself until the boat disappears. The narrator's
sister, Margot, invites Santiago over for breakfast. She finds Santiago attractive, and imagines the good fortune
of his betrothed, Flora Miguel. He accepts her invitation, but says he must go home first to change into his
riding clothes.
Many people on the docks know that Santiago is going to be killed, but many also think that he isn't in danger
anymore. Everyone thinks Santiago has been warned that he is going to die. Margot learns that Angela Vicario,
the bride of the day before, has been returned to her parents' house because her husband has discovered that
she isn't a virgin. Margot is unsure how Santiago Nasar is involved in the mix-up. When she comes home, she
tells her mother what she has heard, and her mother, Luisa Santiaga, goes to warn Placida that people are
going to kill Santiago. However, someone running by tells Luisa not to bother, because he has already been
killed.
Analysis
Although Márquez never explicitly reveals the story's setting within the narrative, the story is based on an true
event that Márquez read about. In the city of Sucre, in Colombia, a young medical student and heir to a large
fortune was killed with a machete outside his front door. The young man was killed by the two brothers of a girl
who had been married but was returned to her family by her husband after he discovered that she was not a
virgin when she married him. When she accused the young medical student of taking her virginity, her two
brothers killed the man.
The novel resembles a mystery. We immediately learn that Santiago Nasar is going to die and continue reading
to find out how and why this event will occur. However, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is not a chronicle; the
narrative does not present the events chronologically, as the title misleadingly suggests. The first chapter
recounts the morning of the assassination by two brothers, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, but versions of the
morning are retold from various different viewpoints throughout the rest of the book. The reader is shown
repeatedly the circumstances of Santiago Nasar's murder, but the overarching question of Santiago Nasar's
guilty is never answered.
Despite the journalistic style of the novel, much of the narrative is comprised of repeated events that seem to
carry ambiguous symbolic meaning. For example, the narrator repeatedly highlights the disputes over what the
weather was like on the day of Santiago Nasar's murder—some people think it was nice out; others believe that

7. it rained. But significance of the rain is left unclear. The narrative is particular about irrelevant details, and
vague about matters of real importance.
The novel reminds us of the difficulty of understanding events as they are experienced, and the arbitrary ways
that the mind chooses to pattern events in retrospect. The arrival of the bishop, for example, is an event that
was seen as potentially very significant in the novel, but turns out not to be especially noteworthy at all, since
the bishop never steps off the boat. At the time, everyone thought that the bishop's arrival would be the biggest
event of the day. In retrospect, the murder overshadows all other memory.
Memory, reality, and symbolism are further confused by the names Márquez chooses for his characters. In
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he includes fictional names along with the names of his own mother, Luisa
Santiago, and of his own wife, Mercedes Barcha. The inclusion of the names of real people ties the events
more strongly to a fixed reality.
Chapter 2
Summary
The narrator tells the story of Bayardo San Roman, the bridegroom of Angela Vicario. Bayardo arrives in
August, six months before his eventual marriage. He is about thirty years old, but seems younger because he
has a slim waist and golden eyes. He says he has come to find someone to marry.
He first sees Angela when she is crossing the town square with her mother, dressed in clothes of mourning; the
two of them are carrying baskets of artificial flowers. The next time Bayardo sees her, she is singing out the
numbers to a raffle at a town event. He buys all of the raffle tickets and wins a music box inlaid with mother-of-
pearl, which he then has delivered to her house as a gift. She never discovers how he found out it was her
birthday.
The Vicarios are a family "of scant resources." Poncio Vicario is a goldsmith, but has lost his sight from doing
so much fine work. Purisimadel Carmen, Angela's mother, had been a schoolteacher until she married. Angela
is the youngest and the prettiest of the family. Pura Vicario wants Bayardo San Roman to identify himself
properly; to gain her approval, he introduces his whole family. The family drives to the village in a Model T
Ford. Bayardo's mother, Alberta Simonds, is a mulatto woman from Curacao, who in her youth had been
proclaimed the most beautiful woman in the Antilles. He has two young sisters, and his father is famous:
General Petronio San Roman, hero of the civil wars of the past century.
Angela does not want to marry Bayardo. Their engagement only lasts four months. Bayardo asks Angela what
house she likes best, and she replies that she liked the farmhouse belonging to the widower Xius, which is on a
windswept hill and overlooks the purple anemones of the marshes. The widower insists that the house wasn't
for sale, but Bayardo keeps offering more and more money until Xius gives in.

8. Nobody knows that Angela isn't a virgin. They have a huge wedding, with extravagant gifts and days and nights
of dancing and revelry. The narrator says that he and his brother, Luis Enrique, along with Cristo Bedoya, were
with Santiago Nasar all the time, at the church and after at the festival. The four of them had grown up together,
and it was hard to believe that one of them could have had such a big secret.
The narrator has a confused memory of the festival—he remembers proposing to marry Mercedes Barcha as
soon as she finished primary school. At six in the afternoon, the bride and groom take their leave and drive to
their new house. The narrator, Luis, Cristo and Santiago all went to Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' house, where
the Vicario brothers also went and were singing and drinking.
Pura Vicario goes to bed at eleven o'clock and has fallen into a deep sleep when there is a knocking at the
door. She opens the door and sees Bayardo and Angela standing there. Bayardo pushes his wife into the
house and kisses Pura on the cheek, thanking her for everything. After he leaves, Pura holds Angela's hair with
one hand and beats her with the other. She does this so stealthily that she does not wake her husband and
other daughters. The twins return home, and Pedro asks Angela who has taken her virginity. She says that it
was Santiago Nasar.
Analysis
This chapter explains the motive for the murder of Santiago Nasar. The narrator implies that Santiago is not, in
fact, guilty of the crime he dies for. However, even if Santiago truly is innocent, we never learn who was guilty
of taking Angela Vicario's virginity. Nor does the narrator—he questions Angela at length later in life, but she
quietly persists in saying that Santiago was the one.
After Bayardo's family comes to visit the Vicarios, it becomes clear to the town that Bayardo can marry
whomever he wants to. Angela Vicario's parents are highly in favor of the match, since Bayardo is handsome,
wealthy, and comes from a prestigious family. Earlier in the narrative, the narrator says that the Vicario boys
"were raised to be men," and that the Vicario daughters "were raised to be married." In this culture, the best
way a woman could improve her life was to marry a husband who would provide for her well. Angela Vicario
protested to her parents that she did not love Bayardo, but her mother dismissed that idea, telling her that love
could be learned.
The brutality of the social conventions surrounding women becomes clear in this chapter. Because she was not
a virgin when she married, not only is Angela abandoned by her husband, but she is beaten by her mother. The
double standards of her culture are highlighted by the fact that the narrator, Santiago, Luis Enrique, and Cristo
are all at a whorehouse doing whatever they please. It is culturally acceptable for men to have premarital sex,
even if they are already betrothed to marry other women.
The importance of the ritual of courtship is also very evident in Colombian culture. Bayardo will do whatever it
takes to win the approval of Angela by showering her with gifts. The economy behind the match is made clear
through this method of courting. Bayardo does not seem tbo concern himself with getting to know Angela
Vicario; he merely demonstrates the amount of money he will be willing to spend on her. Bayardo
demonstrates that he will get the music box and that he will buy the house. It is a way of showing not only the
bride, but the bride's parents, that she will be well taken care of. Another ritual is that the entire family of each

9. spouse must meet before the match can be approved—understanding the background of the spouse is vital, so
that the daughter does not dishonor herself by marrying someone from a questionable family with little money.
Chapter 3
Summary
The Vicario twins later tell the narrator that they began looking for Santiago Nasar at Maria Alejandrina
Cervantes' place, where they had been with him until two o'clock. Since he wasn't there, they went to
ClothildeArmenta's milk shop, which was near Santiago's house, to wait for him to come out.
After Angela Vicario reveals Santiago's name to her brothers, they immediately go to the pigsty. They pick out
the two best knives, wrap them in rags, and have them sharpened at the meat market. Faustino Santos, a
butcher, wonders why they are coming—he thought they were so drunk that they didn't know what time or what
day it was. They talk about the wedding, and Pablo declares that they are going to kill Santiago Nasar.
Because the twins are known to be good people, nobody pays any attention to them. After they leave, Faustino
reports the conversation to a police officer who comes by.
At ClothildeArmenta's milk shop, the twins drink two bottles of cane liquor. They tell her that they are looking for
Santiago to kill him. Clothilde tells her husband, Don Rogelio de la Flor, but he responds that she is being silly.
Meanwhile, the police officer informs Colonel Lazaro Aponte about the Vicario brothers' plan. The Colonel has
settled so many fights the night before that he is in no hurry to settle another. The Colonel hears that Angela
Vicario had been brought home on her wedding night, and realizes the connection between that event and the
impending murder. The Colonel goes to ClothildeArmenta's shop, takes the knives away from the boys, and
tells them to go home. He explains later that he thought the twins were bluffing.
The Vicario brothers go home, get two different knives, and go to have them sharpened. Faustino is confused,
believing that the boys have brought the same knives. Although Pedro makes the decision to kill Santiago,
Pablo insists on following through with the plan. Pablo Vicario's fiancée, Prudencia Cotes, says she never
would have married him if he hadn't upheld his sister's honor by killing Santiago. She waits the three years he
is in jail, and when he gets out he becomes her husband for life.
The twins go back to the milk shop, their knives wrapped in newspaper from Prudencia's house.
ClothildeArmenta gives them rum, hoping to make them so drunk they can't do anything.
The narrator then describes Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' house, where there are musicians, a dancing
courtyard, and "pleasurable mulatto girls." The girls have all been working without rest for three days, taking
care of all who were "unsated" by the wedding bash. The narrator says it was Maria who did away with his
generation's virginity.
But on the night before the murder, Maria wouldn't let Santiago dress up her mulatto girls as he usually did, so
Santiago and Cristo Bedoya and Luis Enrique and the narrator set off with the musicians on a round of

10. serenades. The first house they stop at is the newlyweds', though they don't know that only Bayardo San
Roman is there at that point. They all go to get breakfast, but Santiago says he wants to get an hour of sleep
before the bishop comes.
ClothildeArmenta has told Father Carmen Amador about the Vicarios' plan, but because of the Bishop's arrival,
the Father forgets, and, on his way to meet the bishop's boat, walks right by the milk shop where the murderers
are waiting.
Analysis
This chapter relates the events on the evening of the wedding, the night before Santiago Nasar's death. This
chapter chronologically precedes the first chapter of the book. This disjunction in time indicates the temporal
confusion within the story as a whole. The first chapter tells about the morning of the assassination, and the
third chapter relates the events leading up to that morning.
The novel explores the complexities of the concept of honor. The Vicario brothers believe themselves to be
defending the honor of their sister and family, which is so important to them that they kill a man to preserve it.
The severity of their crime reflects the severity of the limits imposed upon women. The brothers reason that
since whoever took Angela's virginity ruined her chances of finding a suitable husband, that man must be
punished with a comparable degree of severity. Even after Santiago is killed, Angela and her family leave the
town because of the scandal the event has created.
The narrator mentions several times that the Vicario brothers are good people. They do not kill Santiago in a
heated fury; the unfolding of the event takes hours. The town is divided into people who know what is going to
occur and feel that the event should be stopped, people who think that the brothers are joking, and authority
figures who are negligent in their duties and allow the murder to occur. The town's tacit acceptance of honor
and gender codes within their society condones the murder.
Class differences influence the course of events in the novel. Santiago's family represents the upper class.
They have become affluent while others around them exist in poverty. Santiago's difference, resulting from his
beauty and his wealth, makes him an object of suspicion in the town. Poorer residents envy him because of his
superior financial status. Young men in the town are jealous of his proficiency with women. But the combination
of economic and personal interests surrounding Santiago Nasar is never fully elucidated, making his death an
unsolvable puzzle
Chapter 4
Summary
Because Doctor DionisioIguaran is absent, the mayor orders Father Carmen Amador to perform the autopsy on
Santiago Nasar. They perform it at the public school with the help of a druggist and a first-year medical student.

11. The report concludes that the death has been brought on by a massive hemorrhage caused by any one of the
seven fatal wounds. After the poorly executed autopsy, they quickly bury the body.
The narrator goes to see Maria Alejandrina Cervantes after the autopsy, but she won't sleep with him because
she says he smells like Santiago. The Vicario brothers also complain that they can't get his smell off of their
bodies, nor can they sleep. They are placed in the local prison, and Pablo Vicario gets a serious case of the
runs.
The whole Vicario family leaves town. Angela Vicario's face is wrapped so that no one would see the bruises
from the beating her mother gave her, and she was dressed in bright red so that nobody would think that she
was mourning for her secret lover. Poncio Vicario died shortly thereafter. The twins were transferred to a prison
in Riohacha, a day's trip from Manaure, the town that the Vicario family moved to. Prudencia Cotes moves to
Manaure three years later to marry Pablo Vicario after he gets out of jail. Pablo learns to work with precious
metals and becomes a goldsmith. Pedro Vicario goes back into the armed forces, and is never heard from
again.
The mayor goes to check on Bayardo San Roman a week after the murder and finds him lying in his bed,
almost dead with alcohol poisoning. Dr. Iguaran treats him, but as soon as he recovers he throws the mayor
and the doctor out of his house. The mayor informed General Petronio San Roman of the situation, and he
sends his wife and daughters to get Bayardo. They arrive in mourning with their hair loose, and wail as they
walk barefoot to the house. They carry Bayardo out on a cot, put him on the boat and take him away.
Angela Vicario ends up in a town called Guarija, making her living as an embroiderer. When the narrator finally
goes to see her, he finds her with glasses and with yellowish gray hair. He says she is so mature and witty that
it is hard to believe she is the same person. The narrator asks Angela if it was really Santiago Nasar who took
her virginity, and she calmly says it was, even though, as the narrator says, Angela and Santiago were never
seen together.
The narrator says that the true misfortune for Angela is that as soon as Bayardo brings her home, he is in her
life forever. She begins to think about him constantly. She says that when her mother beat her, she wasn't
crying because of anything that had happened—she was crying because of him.
Angela begins to write him letters. She writes a weekly letter to him for seventeen years. Then, halfway through
a day in August, he comes into her workplace. He has gained weight and is balding. He takes a step forward
and lays his saddlebags on the sewing machine, saying, "'Well, here I am." He is carrying one suitcase filled
with clothing, and another suitcase filled with the letters she has sent him, arranged by date and tied with
colored ribbons. They are all unopened.
Analysis
This chapter forms a corollary to the main narrative, which is primarily concerned with clarifying the facts
around Santiago Nasar's death. The love story between Angela and Bayardo is tangential to the plot because it
does not give more information about the murder.

12. The sexism of the characters' world is evidenced by the town's view of Bayardo san Roman as the ultimate
victim after losing his wife. Even though Angela Vicario loses a husband, is beaten by her mother, and is
dishonored for having premarital sex, she does not receive the same consideration as Bayardo.
At the narrative's beginning, Márquez includes a quote by Gil Vincente: "The pursuit of love / is like falconry."
Falconry is mentioned several times in the narrative. The word "falconry" refers to both the actual practice of
hunting small game with falcons and the art of training the falcons to hunt. The definitions of the word reflect
the roles of Bayardo and Angela. In the beginning, Bayardo is hunting Angela as though she is the small game;
by leaving her, he trains her to hunt, and she then hunts him.
The letters that Angela sends to Bayardo explore the notion of the love letter. Whereas the function love letters
is traditionally to express emotion or convey longing, Bayardo does not value Angela's love letters for their
content. By not opening any of the love letters, Bayardo shows that the repeated act of sending a love letter,
rather than the love letter's actual content, demonstrates the love that Angela feels for him. Love letters are
often formulaic and interchangeable; their content is less persuasive to Bayardo than the fact that they continue
to arrive. His attitude makes the love letters part of the ritual of love, and underscores his relationship with
Angela as another ritual within the story.
Chapter 5
Summary
The narrator says that for years, nobody could talk about anything but the murder of Santiago Nasar. Most
people felt at the time that they couldn't intervene too much because it was a matter of honor. Placida Linero
never forgave herself for mixing up the bad omen of birds with the good omen of trees in her son's dream, and
telling her son, before his death, that his dream boded good health.
Twelve days after the crime, the investigating magistrate arrives. Everything the narrator knows about his
character has been derived from the margins of the pages of the brief that the narrator salvaged twenty years
later in the Palace of Justice.
What alarms the magistrate most is that there is not a clue that Santiago Nasar has taken Angela Vicario's
virginity. Angela herself never specified how or where, but insisted that he was the perpetrator. The narrator's
personal viewpoint is that Santiago Nasar died without understanding his death.
Cristo recalls that as Santiago and Cristo Bedoya walked through town on that fateful day, people were staring
at them. A man named YamilShaium, stood in the door of his shop so that when Santiago passed by, he could
warn him of the planned murder. Yamil called Cristo Bedoya to see if Santiago had already been warned.
Cristo left Santiago to go talk to Yamil, and Santiago continued on his way home to change clothes in order to
have breakfast with the narrator's sister.

13. As soon as Yamil related the Vicarios' plan to Cristo, Cristo ran to try and find Santiago. Frantic, he checked
Santiago's house on the off chance that he was already home. Santiago wasn't there, and Cristo took the gun
out of Santiago's night table and stuck it in his belt, not realizing it wasn't loaded.
The people coming back from the docks began to take up positions around the square to witness the crime.
Cristo Bedoya went into the social club and ran into Colonel Lazaro Aponte, and he told the Colonel what was
going on. The Colonel did not believe him at first because he had taken away the knives, but then realized they
had gotten other knives. But because he was slow in leaving the club, the crime had been committed by the
time he arrived. Cristo ran to his own house, thinking that maybe Santiago went to breakfast without changing
his clothes.
Meanwhile, Santiago Nasar was in the house of Flora Miguel, his fiancée. She had heard about the planned
killing, and thought that even if they didn't kill him, he would be forced to marry Angela Vicario in order to give
her back her honor. She was upset and humiliated, and when Santiago came in she was furious. She handed
him a box with all of the letters he had ever sent her. She told him that she hoped they did kill him, and she
went into her room and locked the door.
Santiago's frantic knocking on her door woke everyone else up. Nahir Miguel, her father, told Santiago that the
Vicarios wanted to kill him. Santiago said, "I don't understand a god-damned thing." He left the house, and
started to head home. ClothildeArmenta yelled at Santiago to run, and he ran the fifty yards to his front door.
Placida Linero, Santiago's own mother, had just closed the front door because DivinaFlor lied to her and said
that he was already home and had gone up to his room.
The Vicario twins caught up with him and began stabbing him. After his entrails had fallen out of his body, he
fell to his knees, then managed to stand. He walked more than a hundred yards, completely around the house,
and went in through the kitchen door, and fell flat on his face in his kitchen.
Analysis
This chapter demonstrates the complicity of the town in the murder of Santiago, and shows how they saw
themselves as spectators rather than actors. The division between spectator and actor is blurred by the
narrator's role. He himself acknowledges that he is not absolved of blame. Because the narrator is a part of the
community in which the murder took place, he cannot be an objective observer. The blurring of journalism and
fiction in the story is shown most clearly in the character of the narrator himself, since he hardly discloses any
revealing information. In many ways, he is the most enigmatic of all the characters.
Despite the narrator's interviews of town residents throughout the story, and despite the investigative
magistrate's report, the narrator does not shed any new light, twenty years later, on the murder of Santiago
Nasar. This failure to fully explain events shows that the object of the investigation to be not the discovery of
the truth, but rather the determination of how such a publicized death could have taken place. In the end, the
reader is left with a series of coincidences, moments of personal weakness, and assumptions whose random
variety evades any sort of an overarching explanation or understanding of the crime.
Throughout the novel, the narrator's steady tone and method of progressively disclosing more information,
leads us to think that the truth is about to be revealed. Especially because the narrator repeatedly insists upon

14. Santiago Nasar's innocence, the reader feels that the true identity of whomever took Angela Vicario's virginity
will be clear by the end of the book.
The absence of conclusion also illustrates the importance of ritual in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In a sense,
the entire story is a ritual in that it re-enacts the murder, with no other result than merely showing the reader the
events that happened before and after the event.
Important Quotations Explained
1."The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls were brought up to be married. They knew how to do
screen embroidery, sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy,
and write engagement announcements… my mother thought there were no better-reared daughters. 'They're
perfect,' she was frequently heard to say. 'Any man will be happy with them because they've been raised to
suffer.'"
This excerpt shows the severity of the lives women lead in the reserved Colombian culture of the town. The
narrator describes the upbringing of Angela Vicario and her siblings. Women are not allowed to get jobs or
follow their own dreams; their lives are bounded on all sides by tradition and the expectation to get married and
have families. All of the chores they are taught to do-washing, making flowers-are household chores. A
woman's worthiness as a wife was measured by her beauty in conjunction with her ability to gracefully run all
aspects of a household. The idea that the woman in a marriage is expected to suffer is significant-no woman
enters marriage expecting to be happiness unless she is fortunate enough to love whichever man decides to
court her. In this Spanish culture, unlike Western culture, marriage is not based on love.
2."Pedro Vicario, the more forceful of the brothers, picked her up by the waist and sat her on the dining room
table. 'All right, girl,' he said to her, trembling with rage, 'tell us who it was.' She only took the time necessary to
say the name. 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 well-aimed dart, like a
butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written. 'Santiago Nasar,' she said.
This quote, taken from the end of the second chapter, describes the scene when Angela tells her brothers who
took her virginity. This event demonstrates the escapist ambiguity of Márquez's writing style that runs through
the book as a whole.
The image of a butterfly pinned to a wall is symbolic of both Santiago Nasar's situation and of Angela Vicario's.
Once she has proclaimed that Santiago is the one who took her virginity, his fate, like her own, becomes

15. bounded by cultural mores. Angela Vicario herself was pinned by other darts—if she did not give her brothers a
name, they would have become furious at her for protecting the man who had dishonored her. She "pins"
Santiago with her words, but she herself is "pinned" by the sexism of the culture.
Márquez's description of Angela's thought process as she spoke Santiago's name is interesting because he
suggests that many names, not only of people who are alive, but of people who have passed away, come to
her. The image of the butterfly paired with the evocation of living and dead names floating around in Angela's
mind is a somewhat whimsical and fantastical. This use of magic realism in Chronicle of a Death Foretold
works against the journalistic style of the novel as a whole and obscures what is actually going on. The reader
is presented with a surreal version of what Angela thought, but never finds out if what she said was true.
3."We'd been together at Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' house until after three, when she herself sent the
musicians away and turned out the lights in the dancing courtyard so that her pleasurable mulatto girls could
get some rest…Maria Alejandrina Cervantes was the most elegant and the most tender woman I have ever
known, and the most serviceable in bed, but she was also the strictest. She'd been born and reared here, and
here she lived, in a house with open doors, with several rooms for rent and an enormous courtyard for dancing
lit by lantern gourds bought in the Chinese bazaars of Paramaribo."
This quote, taken from the middle of the third chapter, highlights another way that magic realism works within
the narrative. Maria Alejandrina Cervantes is a whore, but the description of her persona and her home does
not seem to condemn her or her girls for their profession, which comes as a surprise in a culture that censors
women's sexuality so strictly. In the novel, Maria is not depicted as a shameful woman with a dirty profession,
but as a beautiful woman who taught all the men of the community about sex. It seems that women in this
Colombian culture can either accept the strict social codes governing their sexuality, or they can completely
discard them; no in-between is presented.
Márquez's incorporation of details such as the musicians, the dancing courtyard, and the lanterns all make
Maria's house seem like some sort of paradise with colored lamps; it seems a far cry from the neon glow of a
red light district in a city. This illumination of the mundane by means of almost fantastical imagery is notable in
this instance because it praises something that is usually degraded. Márquez's use of magical realism allows
him to avoid invoking traditional cultural perceptions when he so desires, and present reality in a refreshing way
to the reader.
4." 'The truth is I didn't know what to do,' he told me. 'My first thought was that it wasn't any business of mine
but something for the civil authorities, but then I made up my mind to say something in passing to Placida
Linero.' Yet when he crossed the square, he'd forgotten completely. 'You have to understand,' he told me, "that
the bishop was coming that day.'"

16. This quote is taken from the end of the third chapter; the speaker is Father Amador. Father Amador is an
example of the many authority figures who all had the power to stop the crime, but ended up being completely
ineffective in preventing it. The bishop, the priest, a police officer, and the Colonel had all been warned that
Santiago Nasar was going to be murdered, and yet none of them took this news seriously enough to take
effective preventative action.
The book calls the so-called "authority" of these characters into question. They all fail not only to rise above
cultural prejudices and personal weakness, but also to recognize the severity of the event that was about to
occur. Their failure allows the town's view to prevail. Prudencia Cotes illustrates the gravity that the
townspeople afforded matters of honor when she tells us that she would not have married Pablo Vicario if he
had not killed Santiago Nasar. And after the murder, the official verdict seemed to indicate that the Vicarios'
action was just-the twins were only sentenced to three years in prison.
5."She wrote a weekly letter for over half a lifetime. 'Sometimes I couldn't think of what to say,' she told me,
dying with laughter, 'but it was enough for me to know that he was getting them.' At first they were a fiancee's
notes, then little messages from a secret lover, perfumed cards from a furtive sweetheart, business papers,
love documents…nevertheless, he seemed insensible to her delirium; it was like writing to nobody."
This quote is taken from the end of the fourth chapter, in which Angela Vicario explains the letters she
obsessively wrote to Bayardo San Roman. It is significant that Angela says that it was enough for her to know
that Bayardo was receiving the letters, because it was apparently enough for Bayardo to receive the letters
without knowing what it was that she wished to tell him-he never opened them. The fact that Angela Vicario
didn't know what to write, and that Bayardo didn't want to know what she had written, highlights the importance
of the ritual of writing and receiving letters as opposed to the importance of the content. This disinterest in the
content seems contrary to the purpose of writing letters, just as the novel's overall disinterest in the truth
surrounding the murder belies the journalistic mode employed throughout it. It also shows us that the concepts
of love in Colombia are firmly rooted in the actions between two lovers, as opposed to the understanding
between them. Love is defined by ritual
Major Themes
Shared Victimization
No one in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is purely guilty; Marquez makes every
character in the story a partial victim. Angela Vicario, though she names Santiago
as her lover and thus condemns him, is a victim of the double standard between
the genders in her society; she is persecuted for having premarital sex, returned to
her family and beaten, whereas men are expected to go to brothels and have as
much premarital sex as they want. She is required to name a lover, and name she
could have given would have been a death sentence for that man. Bayardo San
Roman is also a victim of deceit, as he married Angela under the pretext that she
was a virgin. While we may think that Angela's virginity or lack thereof shouldn't
concern him, Bayardo, as a product of his culture, cannot help but return her.

17. Santiago Nasar is obviously a victim as well; he is killed for taking Angela's
virginity, an act that he likely did not commit. Finally, the Vicario twins are also
victims of societal expectations: they are bound by honor to try to kill the man
whom Angela cites as her lover. If they hadn't made this attempt, they would have
been seen as weak and unmanly. Prudencia Cotes, for instance, told the narrator
that she wouldn't have married Pablo Vicario if he hadn't been a man and killed
Santiago.
Shared Guilt
Just as Marquez gives all of his characters a measure of innocence in Santiago's
death, so too he gives them a measure of guilt for the murder. Angela, clearly, tells
Santiago was her lover, which likely is not true. Bayardo and the Vicario twins are
also clearly guilty-the one for returning the bride, which set vengeance in motion,
the others for actually committing the murder. But other less likely characters share
guilt in the story as well. Santiago Nasar himself, for instance, sexually abuses his
servant, DivinaFlor, and in turn Divina-who admits that in the bottom of her heart
she wants Santiago dead-likely allows the twins to kill him.
This causal chain of guilt touches less central characters as well-the mayor, for
instance, who is too busy worrying about his dominoes game to prevent the
murder, and the priest, who is too busy worrying about the bishop's visit. Garcia
Marquez suggests that the members of the town-almost all of whom could have
stopped the murder-abet it both through their actions and their inactions.
Honor
The importance of honor to the culture portrayed in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is
evident throughout the novel. The murder itself is committed in order to gain back
the honor that Angela lost when she had premarital sex, and the honor that was
lost to the family with her sex and then failed marriage. Most people in the society
tend to think that disputes over honor are better left to those involved; even the
jury in the Vicario twins' case find them innocent, because they killed Santiago to
win back Angela's honor.
Familial Duty
This is another important theme linked to the novel's depiction of Latin American
culture. When Angela has premarital sex, and married as a non-virgin, she not only
dishonors her family but also fails in her duty to them. According to the society
portrayed in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Angela has an obligation to stay a virgin
and marry to as high a station as she can (even though she doesn't love the man
she marries); if she hadn't had premarital sex, she would have married a very
wealthy man. Other characters also have a duty to their family. Among the
Vicario's, Pedro goes off to war to earn money for the family, while Pablo stays
home to take care of his parents.
Gossip
The first sentence in chapter five reads "For years we couldn't talk about anything
else." Garcia Marquez depicts a society in which everyone in the town knows about
the murder that is going to happen except for the man who is going to be
murdered-until it's too late. This is one of the central ironies of the book: that

18. everyone is so eager to talk about the murder, but no one is willing to talk about it
to the murderer. The natural human tendency to "talk behind someone's back" thus
becomes responsible, in part, for a killing.
Also, Garcia Marquez shows us that human memory, as represented by gossip, is
fragmented and inconsistent. Like a "big fish" story, the tale of Santiago's death
has undergone a gradual transformation in the town's memory up until the time,
twenty-seven years after, when the narrator records it. In fact, no one can even
agree what the weather was like, let alone the details of the murder.
Human Routine
Human beings live by pattern and routine-that is how we're most comfortable-and
the denizens of Santiago's town are no different. Garcia Marquez writes, "Our daily
conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly began to spin
around a single common anxiety." The murder of Santiago Nasar throws off the
whole town and disrupts the peaceful balance of life, thus changing the lives of
many people forever. This unusual event, in turn, is patterned into a new way of
life for the townspeople, who for years and years after the event discuss it
regularly. What had been new becomes routine again.
Another example of the cathartic effect of routine and ritual in human live is the
habit of writing to Bayardo that Angela develops. She sends him a letter every
week for seventeen years, filled with her deepest feelings. Even though he never
reads them, the mere act helps Angela to develop and strengthen as a person.
Indeed, her display of tenacity and love is so overwhelming that it eventually
convinces Bayardo to come back to her. He doesn't need to know what the letters
say; the fact that she has written them so dutifully is enough to convince him of her
constancy.
Fate as an avoidance of Guilt
The townsfolk in the novel obsess over Santiago's death "...because none of us
could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and mission assigned to
us by fate." The narrator of the novel spends much of his ink in convincing us, or
convincing himself, that Santiago Nasar was fated to die under the knives of the
Vicario brothers at the specific time and place that the event happens. He fills his
narrative with forebodings and omens, all of which clearly point to his death before
it happens, though no one is able to interpret them and deter the act.
However, the book also invites consideration that the role of fate is not so strong as
the townspeople come to believe. They all share a part in Santiago's murder-
whether because they endorse the sense of "honor" that insisted upon a death or
because they actually neglected to warn Santiago of the danger he was in. So the
emphasis on fate, in this light, acts as a collective alleviation of guilt. The townsfolk
desperately want to believe that the death was truly "foretold," that it couldn't have
been stopped, thus disburdening them of the moral weight of having killed an
innocent member of their society.
Machismo
Machismo-an important part of Chronicle of a Death Foretold-can be seen in the
emphasis on male pride in the novel and on the sexual behavior of the male

19. characters. The men take pride in visiting Maria Cervantes's brothel, where they
use women for sex. They are not ashamed of their actions, because their society
endorses such desires and deeds. When Bayardo San Roman returns Angela
Vicario, he demonstrates machismo-a woman is only worth marrying, he suggests,
when she is a virgin; after that she is soiled. The Vicario brothers' murder of
Santiago Nasar is also a machismo act-an attempt to take back Angela's honor by
killing the man who deflowered her. As the string of events in the novel shows, the
severe emphasis on masculine and feminine behavior leads to injustice. One man's
machismo commits another man's-Bayardo's refusal to accept Angela leads the
Vicarios to kill Santiago without trial or evidence.
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, geographical as well as cultural
setting is significant throughout the book.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses the setting and values of his Colombian society, along with
surrealism, to enhance the depth of the plot and make the reader empathize with the travesty
that is the death of Santiago Nasar.
First, Marquez uses the natural setting of Columbia to establish surrealism, and also give the
reader a sense of what Latin superstition is, which makes the death of Santiago that much more
personal. For example, when Santiago's mother Placida is interpreting the dream that he has
the night before his death, she interprets the birds as a good omen, and the trees as a bad
omen. After she realizes that she mixed up the meaning of the omens, this is one of the key
moments that make the reader empathize with the murder. The dramatic irony makes it so that
you can't help but feel sorry for Santiago, because everyone in the city, even his own mother,
fails to warn him about the savage murder that's about to happen to him.
Marquez then talks about the cultural setting and the cultural values of his city. This plot
wouldn't have worked in any other type of society than Marquez's Latin society, which is why he
chose to base the story in such a setting. Let me elaborate, even though Marquez puts the fault
and the responsibility of Santiago's death on the shoulders on every individual that didn't take
any action to prevent it, Marquez never once questions the basis of the murder, or even implies

20. that the basis of the murder should be questioned. The honor of Angela Vicario was taken, and
there is no action that isn't justified in order to get it back.
Even men of the cloth, such as Father Amador and the archbishop, decide that the murder is
not only justified, but also trivial, and they both decide to ignore it. I thought that forgiving was
divine, apparently not. I also noticed that in this society, it's ironic that it's unacceptable to sleep
with a woman without having married her, and yet it's completely acceptable to have brothels in
the city, such as when Marquez describes Maria Cervantes as almost an elegant whore, and
also describes the brothel as such a wonderful place.
Clearly honor is the most important aspect of one's being, and one's reputation. Santiago's
situation becomes a lot more personal because even though the Vicario boys try to avenge their
sister, no one ever actually has any proof of his crime.
Thisis why such a plot would only work in Marquez's society.
Another reason why the murder was so personal was because of gender roles. In this
Colombian society, men dominate, undoubtedly, and a woman's true chance to find financial
security is through marriage, and that can't happen if she sleeps with a man while unmarried,
which is the other perspective on the severity of this crime. (Angela's marriage to Bayardo San
Roman)
The next thing that I want to discuss is the significance of where all of the important events in
the novel take place, for example, the knives. When the Vicario boys search for a weapon to kill
Santiago with, they go to the barn. They search for and find the same knives that are used to
slaughter pigs. This event, and where it takes place already foreshadows the fact that Santiago
will be brutally murdered, as if he were some kind of lesser animal.
Another important event, and probably the single event that made most of the citizens guilty
took place at the bar. The Vicario twins announce their plan to murder Santiago right in front of
everyone. Now, the argument that one might have, and that most of the townspeople had, is
that since they were in a bar, the twins were drunk, and they clearly didn't know what they were
saying. Well, this is important because the townspeople should've assumed that when honor is
on the line, and the people trying to reclaim are thinking irrationally, it's even more of a threat
than it normally would be. Furthermore, people who hear this like the mayor, just ignore it, as he
takes the knives and just tells the twins to "go home." And people, who already knew, decided
to continue ignoring it. This is the single event that cements Santiago's fate, and demonstrates
that no one is willing, or desires to prevent this murder.

21. Also, the site of the murder is extremely important, at Santiago's home, right in the eyes of his
mother, the person who accidentally predicted his grim fate, and who once again, accidentally
refused to give him refuge, while he was being continually stabbed.
Finally, the time of day is very crucial to the events and the murder. I noticed that it's nighttime
for most of the novel. This gives it an especially dark atmosphere. (Specifically during murder)
In conclusion, Marquez uses setting and values to create a sense of sympathy for Santiago
Nasar, unfortunately, he had the power and influence of an entire society up against him, and to
maintain the values of this society, his savage murder was necessary.
Honor
The motive for the murder of Santiago Nasar lies undetected until halfway through Chronicle of
a Death Foretold. While everyone knows that Nasar will be murdered, no one knows the reason.
Then, after a night of carousing, the Vicario twins, Pedro and Pablo, return home at their
mother’s summons. The family presses a devastated Angela, the twins’ sister, to tell the reason
for her humiliated return from her marriage bed. When Angela says, “Santiago Nasar,” the twins
know immediately that they must defend their sister’s honor. The twins’ attorney views the act
as “homicide in legitimate defense of honor,” which is upheld by the court. The priest calls the
twins’ surrender “an act of great dignity.” When the twins claim their innocence, the priest says
that they may be so before God, while Pablo Vicario says, “Before God and before men. It was
a matter of honor.”
Revenge
While the twins say the murder was necessary for their sister’s good name, and the courts
agree with them, many disagree, viewing the murder as a cruel act of revenge. The manner in
which they kill Santiago appears to be much more vicious than what a simple murder for honor
would entail. The twins first obtain their two best butchering knives, one for quartering and one
for trimming. When Colonel Aponte takes these knives from them, the twins return to their
butchering shop to get another quartering knife-with a broad, curved blade-and a twelve-inch
knife with a rusty edge. Intent on making sure Santiago is dead, the twins use the knives to stab
him over and over again. Seven of the wounds are fatal; the liver, stomach, pancreas, and colon
are nearly destroyed. The twins stab him with such vengeance that they are covered with blood
themselves, and the main door of Placida Linero’s house, where Santiago was killed, must be
repaired by the city. Further supporting the view that the twins acted in revenge is the fact that
they show no remorse for the murder.
After the murder, the twins fear revenge from the Arab community. Even though they believe
they have rightfully murdered Santiago for their sister’s honor, the twins think that the tightly knit
community of Arabs will seek revenge for the loss of one of their own. When Pablo becomes ill
at the jail, Pedro is convinced that the Arabs have poisoned him.
Sex Roles
Purisimadel Carmen, Angela Vicario’s mother, has raised her daughters to be good wives. The
girls do not marry until late in life, seldom socializing beyond the confines of their own home.
They spend their time doing embroidery, sewing, weaving, washing and ironing, arranging
flowers, making candy, and writing engagement announcements. They also keep the old

22. traditions alive, such as sitting up with the ill, comforting the dying, and enshrouding the dead.
While their mother believes they are perfect, men view them as too tied to their women’s
traditions.
Purisimadel Carmen’s sons, on the other hand, are raised to be men. They serve in the war,
take over their father’s business when he goes blind, drink and party until all hours of the night,
and spend time in the local brothel. When the family insists on Angela’s marrying Bayardo, a
man she has seldom even seen, the twins stay out of it because, “It looked to us like woman
problems.” “Woman problems” become “men’s problems” when the family calls the twins home
upon Angela’s return. She feels relieved to let them take the matter into their hands, as the
family expects them to do.
Deception
Angela Vicario is not a virgin when she marries Bayardo, but no one would suspect otherwise.
Her mother has sheltered her for her entire life. Angela has never been engaged before, nor has
she been allowed to go out alone with Bayardo in the time they have known one another.
Angela, however, is concerned that her bridegroom will learn her secret on their wedding night,
and considers telling her mother before the wedding. Instead, she tells two of her friends, who
advise her not to tell her mother. In addition, they tell Angela that men do not really know the
difference and that she can trick Bayardo into believing that she is a virgin. Angela believes
them. Not only does Angela wear the veil and orange blossoms that signify purity, she carries
out her friends’ plan of deception on her wedding night.
Supernatural
Throughout Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez weaves elements of the supernatural. From
the dreams that Santiago has the night before his death to the signs that people note foretelling
his death, a sense of an unseen force prevails. For example, Santiago has inherited his “sixth
sense” from his mother, Placida. Margot feels “the angel pass by” as she listens to Santiago
plan his wedding. Supernatural intervention pervades all aspects of the characters lives. For
example, Purisimadel Carmen tells her daughters that if they comb their hair at night, they will
slow down seafarers.