Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Society's Expectations

A discussion of society is always a difficult topic to speak about because every society is built with its own ideals and expectations. Along with those ideals and expectations, the society has flaws among the ideals causing an individual to act out against or for the ideals to prove themselves worthy of society’s views. The individuals act based on the way that they have been raised and conditioned forming their own views and intel that is either like their community it different from it.

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold the society of the town of Sucre, Colombia.

Influence of Church and Honour

The society is 90% Roman Catholic, which means the church plays a heavy influence over society and as well as personal affairs. The role in religion played into things such as familial roles and the gender roles as well. The church is or was supposed to be a positive aspect to one’s life following the scriptures and values to become a holy person.

These values are upheld by the community of the town of and the values are used to judge others of the society. The Vicario family was a family that took pride in their good image. They were the perfect family and because of the fact that Angela Vicario had been deflowered before marriage, it had tarnished their image. This created a duty to regain their perfect image, this tarnished image was caused because of the ideals of the church, the taboo of premarital sex, which was pushed onto women to uphold, “”().

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The church put this expectation on the women and once the females had lost their virginity they were looked on as a disgrace, but this taboo is encouraged for men.

As Angela Vicario’s honor was taken so was the honor of the family and so it was up to her brothers, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, to carry on the deed of retrieving it, which ultimately was murdering her perpetrator. As the reader knows the Vicario twins, in fact, did kill Angela’s perpetrator, who was none other than Santiago Nasar. The twins were expected to do this deed and in court, they justified themselves saying that it was because of honor that they killed him. This shows how deep society can affect a person. The society corrupted the young boys’ consciousness and convinced them that what they did was justified. The Vicario twins’ conscience is conditioned by the society they live in because everything they have been taught had revolved around honor and pride, this pride is also linked to machismo. A value that church upheld, without the premarital sex taboo and without the strong presence of machismo Santiago Nasar would not have died, because of this pressure of being masculine that society pits in young men.

The Columbian society was tied to the values of the church so they took pride in being an ideal figure in their society. We blame the society for the boys’ actions however in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck also should have been conditioned by society to reject to help Jim, a slave, but instead of doing what society expected he helped Jim be free. It is difficult to abandon all that you’ve ever known but Huck did abandon the conventional views that society had put on a black man. It was conflicting matter for him because he was willing to break out of the social norms and follow his conscience. Jim later makes comment on how “”().

Influence of Society

You can’t change a person because of the way they are raised and that’s how the Vicario twins had justified themselves in their society. Because it was society who built them into the people they are. Just as the church played an immense role in the Columbian society is still plays a role in 21st century America, as well as machismo. Currently we are in a time where it is ok to be feminine as a male however many men still want to preserve their manhood, these men can hardly show emotion and hide themselves from being exposed to feminine qualities because they have a certain standard to keep up in order to please others when he should not be thinking of what others think of him. The role of religion, religion looks down on people of every background.

As many Christians and Catholics reject family members for coming out as homosexual, this causes many of those people to hide themselves and these individuals become damaged as they are told that they are a sin. Although these aren’t the same problems in the novel it shows how Gabriel Garcia Marquez presented society in his community and in ours. Marquez shows how society plays an immense role in the lives of everyone and he points out the flaws in our expectations.