Prompt: What are some overarching motifs and symbols embedded within the text of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s dramatic novella: Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

The novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and further published in 1981. It is based on the true story of a man by the name of Santiago Nasar who had been accused for taking the virginity of an unmarried woman named Angela Vicario. The story takes place in a small town in Colombia, South America, set in the 1950’s. According to the Colombian culture, it is a terrible sin to take the virginity of an unmarried woman, so in the novel, this sinful man is murdered by two of the woman’s family members. Many motifs and symbols are embedded within the text of …show more content…
Honor can be proven through the novel to be one of the most important aspects of Colombian society in the 1950’s. The Vicario brothers that were planning to murder Santiago believed that the honor of their family could be saved by it. They also strongly believed that their sister Angela, lost her value when she lost her virginity to a man she was not married to. It was necessary to kill Santiago in order to regain their family’s name and part of their honor. On page 29 of the novel, the narrator suggests that this seems to be a morally just reason to kill someone and could have been repeated again and again without thinking twice. He states that “They would have done it again a thousand times over for the same reason”. This part of the text allows the reader to comprehend that in Colombian society honor is greatly admired, and that Colombian society is desperate to do anything in the name of honor. They believed that premarital sexual intercourse was entirely degrading and brought their familial social status underground. This can lead to the questioning of why Colombians in the 1950’s viewed premarital sex as such a degrading action for women to do but not