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Chronicle Of A Death Foretold By Gabriel García Márquez

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Gabriel García Márquez wrote in the midst of the Postmodernism literary movement, when it was generally agreed upon that there was nothing new left to create, so writers were left to recycle old works. They often added more pessimistic outlook, just as Márquez does with his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which is evidently a distorted version of The Bible which comments on the corruption of the modern day Church. Together, Márquez’s postmodernism writing style and mission to unveil the corruption in the Church produces a distorted version of The Bible.
Put simply, both Chronicle of a Death Foretold and the Bible follow an innocent person whose death could have been easily prevented by townspeople but was instead ensured. The chronicle …show more content…

While there is much focus on the exact timing of the last hours of Santiago Nasar’s life, Márquez chooses to remove the events from their sequential order, contradicting the title of the novel. This inconsistency exposes a hidden detail, that the Chronicle of a Death Foretold is not one of Santiago Nasar but of Jesus Christ. If one were to reorder the novel chronologically, the events would largely follow the timeline of the Bible central event. Just as the crucifixion begins with a betrayal, Santiago’s execution begins with an accusation by Angela Vicario, which the narrator implies to be inherently faulty, “she found [Santiago’s name] at first sight among many, many easily confused names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written” (Márquez 47). -analyze- It is later revealed that “no one believed it had really been Santiago Nasar,” further condemning the townspeople who let an innocent face an undeserved execution, regardless of his unpleasant personality (Márquez 89). In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, it is said that “at six o'clock in the morning everybody knew [of Santiago’s impeding murder]”, which also means that everyone was capable of warning the blameless man from being murdered for a crime he did not commit (Márquez 112). In The Bible, bystanders are given the explicit ability to intervene in the crucifixion, but instead choose to release “a well-known prisoner” over Jesus, giving such people no exit to the communal guilt that follows an act of injustice (New International Version, Matthew 27:16-17). Just as the religious-to-a-fault pharisees shaped their lives around the Ten Commandments, the bordering-on bigoted townspeople of Chronicle of a Death Foretold valued

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