Chronicle Of Death Foretold Essay, Research Paper

Chronicle of a Death Fortold, by Gabriel Marquez, is concerned with death in

life and life in death. It was rainy on the day of Santiago Nasar?s murder,

and yet by the account of others, it was not. His death is so mingled with

illusory images that everything seems mystified: much like death itself. The

fact that the story is about how a death consumes the lives of the entire town

as well as the victim, shows that it is concerned with death in life and asks us

to evaluate our own views. Not only is the story concerned with death in life on

the literary level, but the people of the town feel obliged to honor and offer

gifts to a bishop that doesn?t even like the town. It is perhaps because they

fear if they do not keep their faith, they are putting in jeopardy their fate

after death; this is the primary concern of all religions, life after death and

fear of the unknown. "For years we couldn?t talk about anything else. .

.and it was obvious that we weren?t doing it from an urge to clear up

mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge

of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate"(113). "?All

right, girl,? he said to her, trembling with rage, ?tell us who it was?. .

.?Santiago Nasar,? she said"(53). Whether or not Santiago Nasar was the

reason behind Angela Vicario?s lost honor, his death shapes and defines her

life afterwards. Many in the town describe her as being a woman half in mourning

and the narrator is amazed at how she ends up understanding her own life despite

how much she was made to die in life(101). Chronicle of a Death Fortold makes us

look at life and death and face uncertainty about our future. Because it

questions death and our belief in religion, it depreciates, in a sense, our

strong belief in the glories of afterlife. Like the narrator, maybe we,

"couldn?t bring ouselves to admit that life might end up resembling bad

literature so much"(102). It makes us think that we should be content now,

and not later, and that the intermingling of life and death is not purely

coincidental, but perhaps one is no greater than the other.