Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known for his short stories and novels, especially “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which has magical intensity and a great wealth of remarkable characters and incidents. His novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which is very strange and brilliantly appreciated, is sort of a murder mystery in which the detective, Marquez himself, pieces together the events associated with the murder 27 years earlier of Santiago Nasar, a rich, handsome fellow who lived in Columbian coastal town. Thus, as a character in his own novel, Marquez interviews people who remember the murder and studies documents assembled by the court. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the author Marquez suggests that women can overcome Columbia’s double standards as shown through that double standard itself, a woman regaining innocence, and a woman overcoming with dignity. First, in this novel Marquez includes double standards and how women are treated differently than the men. This topic covers women not being able to marry if they lost their virginity while men have the complete opposite expectations. While women must marry as virgins, unmarried men can go to prostitutes “serviceable in bed” (page 74). In fact, in this novel Angela Vicario was unable to marry Bayardo San Roman because she had lost her virginity before was married. “‘[Margot] felt she was going to die’” when discovering Angela is not a virgin (page 24). In addition, since men can do whatever they please they could also get away with almost anything. Santiago often grabs his servants and tells one, “‘the time has come for you to be tamed’” (page 8). In brief, the treatment of the men versus women was unfair in this point in time in this Columbian town. Secondly, Marquez tells the reader how Angela finally accepts the fact that her virginity is gone and no one will ever want to marry her. Angela refuses to lie about her virginity, thinking the lie “‘dirty’” (pages 105-106).