Symbolism In Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

Gabriel Marquez was born in Colombia in 1928, whilst he was growing up Colombia was an overwhelming Roman Catholic country and the church heavily influenced the society. This can be seen very early on already in the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold because every time the bishops boat goes past their town everyone dresses up and hopes to get “a chance to kiss the bishop’s ring”. The story follows the murder of Santiago Nasar, who is accused of taking Angelica Vicaro’s virginity. When she is returned back to her families home on her wedding night her brothers decide to regain their families honour by killing the man who had originally taken that honour from them. From this alone we can deduce that Colombian society followed old traditions

Traditionally in Colombia, people lived in quite small towns meaning gossip was spread easily and everyone knew everything about everyone. “When the bishop 's boat bellowed, almost everybody was up to receive him and there were very few of us who didn 't know that the Vicario twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him, and, in addition, the reasons were understood down to the smallest detail.” This quote shows how there were only a few people who didn’t know about the plan; yet they were willing to let it just happen without knowing the reason behind it. Reading the novel from a western perspective, the whole situation is just plainly wrong and we know that what is happening in the town is known as the by stander effect. No one is willing to save the life of someone in order to be out of place in his or her

Marquez uses machismo to explore the double standards of male and female sexuality in Latin society. We already know that women were forced to marry and had to be virgins until marriage, yet from the beginning of the novel we already see that Santiago has a lot of interaction with other women. This shows us that society is very old fashioned and flawed since women and men should be equal. “Divina Flor, who was the daughter of a more recent mate, knew that she was destined for Santiago Nasar’s furtive bed”, from this quote we can deduce that women have a certain role in society which is underneath the mean and that they have no choice but to accept their fate. Latin superstitions are also used in the novel; Marquez uses the imagery of birds and trees to get this point across. “Any dream about birds means good health”, here Santiago’s mother explains to him that she believes he has a good future ahead. This is ironic because from the first page of the book we already know he was murdered. “On the day they were going to kill