The Theme Of Death In Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

If you knew about a murder, that was barely going to happen, would you try to stop it?
Santiago Nasar died an innocent death, when Bayardo San Roman, decided to marry Angela Vicario. Angela Vicario was not a virgin anymore when this happened, and when Bayardo San Roman found out, he took her back to her house, and Angela’s twin brothers forced her to name her first lover, and she named Santiago Nasar. The twin brothers announced their intentions of murdering Santiago Nasar in order to honor their sister and family. But if everyone knew about this murder that was going to happen, why did no one try stopping it? In the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez develops the theme of diffusion of responsibility through people not wanting to get involved, people not believing, and even people forgetting.
First of all, people didn’t want to get involved with Santiago’s death. On page 52 of the novel, it says “Their reputation as good people was so well-founded that no one paid any attention to them. ‘We thought it was drunkard’s baloney’”. Even when the Vicario brothers told them, “We’re going to kill Santiago Nasar”, they didn’t want to get involved, they used excuses such as, they had a reputation as good people. Even if they knew it was going to happen they didn’t do anything because they didn’t want to get involved because they wanted someone else to do something first before they did something.
Secondly, people didn’t want to believe the Vicario brothers when they said they were going to kill Santiago Nasar. The narrator tells us what his brother had said to him when he said he didn’t remember “ But even if I did remember, I wouldn’t have believed it, he told me many times, ‘Who the fuck would ever think that the twins would kill anyone much less with a pig knife!’”(69). This quote relates to the first quote as well because of all the good things they knew or heard of the Vicario brothers that lead them to not believe them when they said they were going to kill Santiago Nasar. Because of this a lot of people didn’t believe them. Lastly, some people even forgot to do something about the problem, not because they didn’t want to but because they forgot.
The narrator explains what Father Amador has confessed to him years later, “My first thought was that it wasn’t any business of mine… but then I made up my mind to say something… yet when he crossed the square, he’d forgotten completely.” (70). He wanted to say something but he forgot, although, if he had really wanted to do something about it, he could have said something in the moment before risking the chance of forgetting. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t able to completely stop it as long as you know you tried and know you were doing the right thing. Gabriel Garcia Marquez develops the theme of diffusion of responsibility in the novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, through people not wanting to get involved, people not believing, and even people forgetting. Santiago Nasar died an innocent death because people didn’t take action. Now you think about what you would do in this situation, you know about a murder that's going to happen, are you going to stay quiet and mind your own business or try to help someone
out? Work Cited

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New
York: Vintage Books, 2003. Print.