Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a relatively small book, but it is open to countless interpretations as to its overall purpose. Here I will discuss two of these interpretations: Isabel Alvarez-Borland's analysis views the short story as a question of why a senseless murder was allowed to occur; Carlos J. Alonso focuses on the fact that the text is a ritual means of redemption. Both analyzes are strongly argued and highly conceivable, offering valuable insights into the text and developing meaningful interpretations. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay “From Mystery to Parody” by Isabel Alvarez-Borland. this was ample opportunity to arrest him. The analysis blames Santiago Nasar's death on the city's hypocritical codes of honor and accuses residents of their complicity. In this society, women must remain virgins until marriage or be considered defiled and damaged. Men, on the other hand, seem to do whatever they want, without any social repercussions. They even solicit whores before and even after marriage. For example, the narrator states about Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, the town whore: “She is the one who suppressed the virginity of my generation” (Garcia Marquez, 74). Indeed, in this vision, the fault is the mentality of city dwellers. This social code constitutes a blatant double standard, strictly censoring women's sexuality while men date and have promiscuous sex. In reality, Santiago is a real womanizer himself, going to "smother the bud of any rebellious virgin that began to appear in these woods." The town is so steeped in these antiquated beliefs that the Vicario brothers are ultimately absolved of murder. The court accepts the argument that the murder was a necessary defense of honor and, after three years in prison, they are free men. The murder plot is known to almost everyone because the Vicario brothers do not hide their plan. The town's knowledge of the murderous plot is illustrated by the narrator's ironic comment: "There never was a death so foretold." Death is announced to almost everyone, except Santiago himself. It seems absurd to think that the murder is authorized or that Santiago is not warned earlier, with such an abundance of prior knowledge. Pablo and Pedro Vicario feel so strongly bound by their society's codes of honor that they kill a man. In fact, the reader gets the impression that the Vicario brothers don't even want to kill Santiago; they simply do it because they feel obligated to do so. They believe that their family's honor can only be redeemed by the public murder of Santiago. They cannot back down because the code of honor binds them to a course of action. The extent of the social pressure placed on boys can be seen in Prudencia Cotes' surprising statement: "I knew what they were doing and not only did I agree, but I would never have married Pablo if he hadn't done what a man should do." The only way to stop them is through the people around them, but the residents fail to prevent the murder. The town accepts and lives by this code of honor that allows murder to regain respect By failing to stop the murder, each was, to some extent, complicit in the crime Alvarez-Borland's analysis goes on to state that the latter two. Sections of the story can be seen as the author's condemnation of the townspeople.the penultimate section, the narrator describes the autopsy as a massacre, a murder after the murder. This, coupled with the gruesome depiction of the actual murder, "can therefore be seen as motivation for the reader to realize, along with the implied perpetrator, the dire consequences of hypocritical honor codes" (Alvarez-Borland 221). Moreover, as the analysis points out, the point of view shifts from "I" to "we" in the fifth section, which "can be seen as further evidence of the author's condemnation of the narrator and the inhabitants, thus presenting a scathing commentary on the corruption of their moral values ​​as well as their institutions." The book reveals the city as it really is: ugly and dirty. In fact, after the crime to which these outdated codes of honor led, the city filled with collective guilt, the town is forever changed, perhaps symbolized by Bayardo San Roman's house and car: "The house began to collapse. The wedding car collapsed near the gate, and finally only its carcass rotted by the weather remained. (Garcia Marquez 100). Don Rogelio de la Flore dies from the shock of seeing how Santiago is murdered. The former financier of Santiago, Flora Miguel, flees with a lieutenant who then prostitutes her to a neighboring town. Divina Flore, now obese and faded, sits surrounded by her children from different fathers. Each person suffers a different fate. , from death to madness, to that of the narrator, but it seems certain that the city has paid the price for its sins While Alvarez-Borland's analysis considers the Chronicle of a Death Foretold as a text which. explores why If murder is authorized, Carlos J. Alonso argues that the purpose of the novella is to reconstruct the murder as an attempt at redemption. In "Scripture and Ritual in the Chronicle of a Death Foretold", he asserts that the text. is simply a means of recreating the crime, not of understanding or reporting on it. The ritual reconstruction of the crime “is an attempt to endow the crime with the prescribed ceremonial order, thus going beyond the centrifugal and fortuitous character of the original events” (Alonso 265). The residents feel a tension that they try to ease by calling the day's events destiny. They constantly find themselves "trying to bring order to the chain of many chance events that made the absurdity possible, and it is obvious that they do so not out of a desire to unravel the mysteries, but because "none of them can continue to live without exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to them by destiny" (Garcia Marquez 113). Calling it destiny makes it easier to accept than a murder which could and should have been avoided had happened. It serves to alleviate the guilt felt by the townspeople. According to Alonso, the story is told simply for the cathartic nature of the tale. murder in order to relieve the tension and guilt of the town and the narrator However, the very fact that the story is a ritual reenactment means that it can never serve as an instrument of redemption Each time it is read and reread. of the story, the reader relives the murder. It is a never-ending cycle of violence that is never erased. In fact, Santiago is killed several times throughout the text. There is of course the macabre murder that appears at the end of the book, but Santiago Nasar also dies symbolically in his dreams. The night before his assassination, for example, Santiago's dream contains the unfortunate omen of birds. His mother, who is an experienced dream interpreter, curiously misinterprets her son's warning, for which she will never forgive herself. Victoria Guzman also kills, 1982.