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Chronicle of a Death Foretold Analysis

According to John Schilb in Making Literature Matter, there are seven elements of fiction that not only serve to add impact to a story but also serve as a useful framework for critical analysis. These are (1) plot and structure; (2) point of view; (3) characters/characterization; (4) setting; (5) imagery; (6) language; and (7) theme. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez' novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the author employs these elements to tell the story or chronicle the events of a murder that occurred when he was a young man in his native Caribbean town. One night as Garcia Marquez was generally enjoying a night of debauchery, his friend Santiago Nasar was murdered, a murder the entire town knew would occur. Mature now, Garcia is the narrator-detective who vows to solve the mystery that surrounds the murder by interviewing people who remember the murder, reviewing court documents, and searching his own memories. As Michaels (G1) notes, "He accumulates many kinds of data - dreams, weather reports, gossip, philosophical speculation - and makes a record of what happened first, second, third, etc. In short, a chronicle." This analysis will discuss how Garcia Marquez uses the seven elements of fiction to enhance his chronicle as well as to reinforce his main theme that love and pain are inextricably bound together in human destiny.

Schilb (95) maintains that the theme of a work of fiction is "the main claim [a work] seems to make" that serves as a form of "assertion, proposition, or statement rather than a single word." In this sense, the theme of Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold is that love and pain seem to be inextricably bound together in human destiny. Throughout the novel, Garcia Marquez provides numerous examples of this, like the pain and love experienced between the disgraced bride and her fiancé Bayardo San Roman or the way love is linked with sexual passion in the work. Passed out during t...

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold Analysis. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 21:49, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2000270.html