CODF written assignment

“They looked like two children,” she told me. And that thought had frightened her, because she had always thought that only children are capable of everything” (Marquez, page 55). Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a non-linear story, written by author Gabriel Marquez, that reconstructs the murder of Santiago Nasar by the Vicario brothers. The murder was an act of getting the honor back to the family that had been lost, because of their careless sister, to Santiago. In order to have a deep understanding of the Colombian culture, Marquez talks about honor and purity repeatedly to help emphasize the reader understand its importance to the people in that time. The common way of introducing this theme was by the carefully thought out names of the characters and how their actions had either enhanced their pure characteristic or decrease it. The novel talks about the change in the Colombian culture and how honor gets tied to purity, instead of religion, unlike it had been before them.

Marquez‘s leading character, and the person the whole story revolves around is, Santiago Nasar. He is also known in the novel as, Angela’s “perpetuator.” His name hints the word saint. This is ironic because, Santiago didn’t have any saint-like personality as he was seen trying to seduce women the way his father had before him. His surname, “Nasar”, hints the word “Nazareth” which is the birth place of Jesus. Also the part in the novel when he is told why the Vicario brothers were looking for him, we see him genuinely surprised and “didn’t have the slightest idea” of what was going on. This tells us that Santiago may have not been responsible for deflowering and, that the whole act of ‘honor killing’ might not have been the right judgment to take, seeing...

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... Her name tells the reader about her pure image and how her daughter stuck to her traditions really well, the way her mother had been unable to, due to Santiago’s father. Divina Flor is what we’d call the control character; she had been named perfectly & her name reflected the characteristics that her mother probably wanted her to have. Even though her name did not have any biblical reference, she was purer than most biblical figures in the novel.

To finish off, the names of the characters, in the novel, were not accidental but well thought out. Marquez named his characters with the intention to explore the theme of purity in the town at that time. The imagery created here was to remind us of the religion that was fading from the town and how that affected the importance of the cultural aspects in the novel, specifically that of purity among the women of the town.