Chronicle of a Death Foretold as a Detective Fiction

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcıa Marquez uses the device of an un-named shadowy
narrator visiting the scene of a killing and beginning an investigation into the past. Indeed, Garcı´a Ma
´rquez 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.
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, Garcı´a Ma´rquez’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’. 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 Garcı´a Ma´rquez’s book, ‘is put to special use’.
The importance of memory in a non-fiction narrative cannot be overstated and Garcı´a Ma´rquez
makes constant and playful reference in the early pages of Chronicle of a Death Foretold to the way the
narrative is constructed from the 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’ Technically speaking, the most
authoritative voice in the text is that of Angela Vicario who is directly quoted 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’.
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’ (Garcı´a Ma´rquez, 1983: 7). But
in the very next paragraph, Victoria Guzma´n, the cook, assures the narrator 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’.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 La´zaro 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’. 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. Garcı´a Ma´rquez’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’.
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,Chronicle depends, rather,
on an associative structure, again in Saussurean terms, in its generation of meaning. 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’
 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 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 first
inscribed in the autopsy report before they ever scarred the body of Santiago Nasar.
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 Marı´a 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’ (Garcı´a Ma´rquez, 1983: 65). Nor do we learn of the narrator’s motivations
for trying after so many years 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.
Williams (1984: 139) wrote, ‘With this novel Garcı´a Ma´rquez 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
nonfiction 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 dishonor.
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 well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no
will whose sentence has already been written. ‘‘Santiago Nasar,’’ she said’.
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. Garcı´a Ma´rquez’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.
Garcia Marquez’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. 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 mythologize, reliving, exaggerating and exulting in their own part _ Chronicle rewrites
another chronicle: the dominant chronicle of Spanish American consciousness’. 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.