Death Foretold Setting

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s portrayal of a small, close knit Colombian town in his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold contributes to the theme of community which sets up for Santiago Nasar’s murder. The setting takes place in a small, Colombian town during the 1950s. Colombia in the 1950s was undergoing prominent events that would have an everlasting affect in Colombia. With violence being such a heavy establishment in Colombia, violence contributes to the intensity of Santiago Nasar’s murder. The aspects of the setting in the novel such as culture and community influences the lifestyle of the characters within the setting. Family in Colombian culture is held highly indispensable, as seen with the Vicario twins and their persistence to avenge
Everyone recalls the weather being different that day, and it seems that no one knows for sure exactly what the weather was like on the day Santiago Nasar was killed. On page four, the narrator states, “No one was certain if he was referring to the state of the weather. Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea breeze coming in though the banana groves…But most agreed that the weather was funeral, with a cloudy, low sky and the thick smell of still waters…” (Marquez 4). The fact that no one can seem to properly and accurately recall the state of the weather on the day Santiago was killed symbolizes to the unreliability of chronicling the death of Santiago. No one in the novel is reliable, not even the narrator. Due to the unknown state of the weather on the day he was killed, maybe he was killed in the middle of a hurricane, or he could have even been killed on a cold, windy day. However, with the conflicting interpretations of the weather, no one is reliable enough to tell what really happened. Pablo states, ”It wasn't raining…There was a sea wind and you could still count the stars with your finger” (Marquez 61). On the contrary, Colonel Lázaro Aponte states, "I can remember with certainty that it was almost five o'clock and it was beginning to rain” (Marquez 56). The events the narrator tell us aren’t reliable, simply because we see that nothing is consistent with respect to the weather. Due to the fact that the people in the town are unreliable when it comes to giving an accurate description of the state of the weather, it symbolizes the lack of reliability the town as a whole has in keeping Santiago Nasar alive. No one in the town was reliable enough to keep Nasar alive, and because of the fact that the close-knit