Image of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Chronicle of a Life Foretold Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing has been described as “richly composed worlds of imagination, reflecting the continent’s of life and its conflicts” (Nobelprize. org). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude which explores the genre of magical realism. Marquez’s William Faulkner-esque style combines narrative talent with the mastery of the literary mode, stream of consciousness.

His international appeal and success come from his ability to lead readers to a place where the improbable and the truth converge, two ingredients which make up his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Marquez uses a “pseudo-journalistic reconstruction” in Chronicle of a Death Foretold to portray the importance of honor through the strict, ritualistic tradition of a Latin American community in the 1950s. This reconstruction is a narrative device that often drifts in and out of fantasy, demonstrated when the author starts off with “on the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning” (pg.

of Chronicle). Death plays a key role in his stories which revolve around the deceased or the soon deceased and involves all characters. The novel surrounds Angela Vicario, a newly married young women found on her wedding night not to be a virgin. In order to repair the family’s reputation, her two brothers set out to kill their sister’s perpetrator. The boys’ murderous plot is gradually revealed to the whole town, but the villagers choose to ignore it.

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The fact that death becomes a reasonable punishment for the crime of taking a girl’s virginity embodies the importance of honor and just how vital it is to keep intact.

None of the town’s people ever question any action that is taken in order to preserve someone’s honor. Marquez explores the psyche of an isolated society in a time of chaos when ritual is the only familiar habit. The author’s own background serves as an undertone to much of his writing. He derives large aspects such as the setting of the novel from his own upbringing. Marquez, born in 1928 in a small town in northern Colombia (Nobelprize. org), grew up in an era where family tradition and revolutionary new ideas were booming. The motif that women married for convenience rather than love is conveyed as: “the brothers were brought up to be men.

The girls were brought up to be married. Any man would be happy with her daughters because they’ve been raised to suffer. ” (pg. 31 of Chronicle). The location of the novel is never revealed, however it is described as being between the mountains and the Caribbean sea in northern Colombia, precisely where Marquez grew up. Characters in his novel also reflect the people who surrounded him during his childhood like his grandfather, a pensioned colonel who founght in the Spainish civil war. Don Lazaro Aponte, a character found in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a colonel from the academy, “making use of his good retirement” (pg. 9 of Chronicle). It is obvious that Marquez’s rich Colombian culture can be seen throughout. Like most of the Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez is against oppression and is passionate on the side of the poor and the weak. He’s active as a journalist raising awareness of problems in the Latin community. His writing is acclaimed for being reminiscient of Spanish folk culture and oral-story-telling which also intertwines European modernism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is so universally appealing because of his work’s multifaceted combination of the world’s rich culture.