The Themes Of The Mystery Novels, By Santiago Márquez

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on” (Márquez, 2). In the event that Márquez wrote the book in a random order, it was based on retelling Santiago’s Nasar’s murder. Additionally, the weakness of the brain’s memory being depicted throughout the novel, by the commoners that lived in a small town inside of Colombia. If the order of the book was told in a different way, then it would’ve lost its cliffhanger and the foreshadowing in the story. A big important factor is the time period and location the story took place in. If it were written in another time period or location, the plot of the story would change dramatically. Lastly, an alarming
Generally, throughout mystery stories, the detective slowly finds out some clues and elucidates an accurate conclusion of what may have happened. On the other hand, the reader knows who killed who in this novel, and considering that the human brain has its flaws, the story is told in a random order and includes a lot of repetition stating that Santiago was killed by the Vicario brothers because Angela told Pedro that Santiago stole her virginity before marriage. In the novel, Márquez mentions how memory is “broken” and “shattered”, “trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards” (Márquez, 4). This could also be an explanation or subtle hints as to why he chose to write the novel in a non-chronological order. Additionally, it allows for the novel’s true story to lie, not in the destination, but the journey. However, in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the reader is aware who murdered Santiago Nasar and why they murdered him. The purpose was to retell the journey and give the readers an exposition of the outcome, which ends up being an astonishing expedition and quite the plot
“She was certain that the Vicario brothers were not as eager to carry out the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favor of stopping them” (Márquez, 34). To contribute to this thought relating to the theme, not all scenes seem to be meant to support the journalistic motif. Also, the lack of uncertainty throughout the story with no explanations does not help out with Márquez’s goal of the journalistic theme. For example, “The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get married. They knew how to do screen embroidery, sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy, and write engagement announcements” (Márquez, 18). These scenes in the novel seem to be fiction because it does not have anything to do with the fact that Santiago was assassinated. Another example of unexplainable objective, “The parents of Santiago Nasar and Flora Miguel had agreed that they should get married. Santiago Nasar accepted the engagement in the bloom of his adolescence, and he was determined to fulfill it, perhaps because he had the same utilitarian concept of matrimony as his father” (Márquez, 65-66). These quotes do not support the theme nor the plot of the story and are just forced into the story for extra knowledge that is not necessary;