Death Foretold Gender

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In a world where people are expected to act a certain way, some people can be pushed too far and end up doing things that they may regret or that may hurt them. In the book Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, a man is murdered while the entire town looks on. The two men who murder him are pinned by a code of machismo and societal expectations that force them to kill him. They continue to defend their crime because it was a matter of honor and they are affected by this their entire lives. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, Pedro and Pablo Vicario are victims of gender-based societal expectations in order to illustrate how such expectations can confine people to a set of actions or principles that …show more content…

They seem to stall and try to stop the killing from happening throughout the morning but are unsuccessful and have to kill Santiago in the end. The narrator says that when interviewing Clotilde Armenia, the owner of the milk shop, she stated the brothers "looked at him more with pity," as though they felt sorry for what they were about to do. Perhaps they felt more compelled by the expectations of society to kill him than by their own motives. Later, the Colonel takes the twins' knives away and tells Clotilde Armenta it was so they had no weapons to kill with, but she says to him "That's not why. It's to spare those poor boys from the horrible duty that's fallen on them." (Márquez 57) She also says she had sensed "the Vicario brothers were not as eager to carry out the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favor of stopping them." (Márquez 57) Clotilde seems to have pity on the boys for what they must do. She knows they are being pressured to carry out the task of killing their friend for their sister's "lost honor," but she knows they do not want to do it. The brothers seem to have warned everyone in the town of the murder, but no one takes them seriously. The people who do take them seriously, namely Clotilde Armenta and Luisa Santiaga, do not carry enough authority and cannot convince …show more content…

Pedro and Pablo were raised in a society in which machismo and honor are upheld as great moral codes. They are raised to follow these codes and are compelled by them to ultimately kill their friend for their sister's "lost honor." The society around them seems to be okay with the murder on the basis of the motive, honor. The boys, though, seem to feel sorry for their actions and seem to suffer because of what they were compelled by societal expectations to do. Forcing people into boxes based on their gender and what their society expects can change them for the worse and force them to do things that may not necessarily be good. As a whole, society in general should be cautious of the way it persuades or forces people to think and act and how it could affect

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