Hour Of The Star Literary Analysis

Remarkable masterpieces of literature are created when oppressed individuals decide to unleash their prolonged vexation through the ink of a pen. During the Latin American boom, these tyrannized people joined hands to voice out their bottled up emotions through writing. It seems as though the authors of the two novellas, Hour of the Star and Chronicle of Death Foretold, are rebelling against the injustice by presenting some naked bitter truths about the Latin American societies. The plot of Chronicle of a Death Foretold deals with a murder, or rather an ‘honour killing’ that took place in a small village in Colombia. According to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s autobiography, the novella was inspired by the murder of his friend Cayetano Gentile, who is Santiago Nasar in the story. Hour of the Star is narrated by an upper class writer Rodrigo SM, who struggles to understand and write about the life and suffering of a north-eastern Brazilian girl, Macabea. The novella was published one month before Clarice Lispector’s death. It is often believed that it was inspired by Lispector’s own life. Both, Hour of

In Chronicle of death foretold, Marquez highlights the fact that in the Latin American society concept of virginity existed only for women. Essentially, the author continuously emphasizes on the sexual oppression women have to go through, because of the fact that they are women. The reason for this is not just patriarchy but also the societal pressure. ‘The only thing they believe is what they see on the sheet.’ Deeply analyzing the novella further, we realize that women are taught to accept the oppression and succumb to the patriarchy because that was how it was practiced for many generations. This is what the mother of three daughters says: “Any man will be happy with them because they’ve been raised to