The Memory Of Angela Vicario's '

The three quotes provided are similar in that they all explore aspects of the difficulty of looking at events through memories. In the first quote, the narrator demonstrates that as far as the day of Santiago Nasar’s death goes, there are conflicting accounts of the weather that morning. The second compares looking at life through memories to looking at it through shards of broken glass – one cannot look at one complete picture and is thereby left to piece the memory together themselves. The final quote looks at the mismatch between the narrator’s mother’s memory of Angela Vicario’s auspiciousness and the narrator’s own recollection of her “helpless air and a poverty of spirit”.
More than just relating to memory, the quotes provided reveal
important aspects of Garcia Marquez’s unique style of storytelling, namely his penchant for magical realism. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is an excellent example of his poignant use of the theme of supernatural in the way its narrative navigates around the difficulty of viewing life and predicting the future through memories – Garcia Marquez reveals the “scattered shards” of the memory of Nasar’s murder by jumping back and forth in the timeline of that fateful day in order to give the reader varied accounts. Within these accounts, he goes on to toy with magical realism in relating to the reader accounts of supernatural divination – the “funereal” weather that matches Nasar’s portentous dream, the narrator’s mother’s perception of Angela’s birth – and how they disagree or agree with others, generating a mystical, enigmatic air for the book as a whole.