(A plaque of Gabriel García Márquez in Paris,
France. Image courtesy of Patrik Tschudin on
Wikimedia Commons. License CC BY.)
- There are some wonderful lines in Chronicle of a Death Foretold:
“Any dream about birds means good health” (6) “No one could understand such fatal coincidences” (12) “Any man will be happy with them because they’ve been raised to suffer.” (31) “Love can be learned” (35) “Just like all the Turks” (101) - García Márquez uses grotesque, surrealistic and comical elements to underscore the absurd nature of life in this provincial town. Choose 2-3 moments in the novel when the author uses these rhetorical elements to underscore the absence of intelligent consideration of the facts that leads to the homicide.
- In Dom Casmurro we had an unreliable narrator. Is our journalist in Chronicle of a Death Foretold reliable? Argue that the strange mix of journalistic and non-journalistic facts collected by the narrator make him credible or not.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a parody of a detective novel. Why? Argue that the author uses the detective form to uncover the soul of the town. Why does this style work well to convey the central themes of this novel?
- Was Santiago Nasar’s death moral or immoral? Base your argument on details of his own demeanor, the “bewilderment of innocence,” facts related to his persona that are shared in the novel. (Do not debate whether honor killing is moral or immoral. For the purposes of this topic, you are inside the town and think it’s an okay practice.)
Choose ONE of these, or any other short quote that you enjoyed, and argue that one small line in Gabriel García Márquez’s prose is related to the core of this narrative.