Analyzing Chronicle of a Death Foretold Structure and Style

Gabriel García Márquez and the Latin American Boom

The novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, was written by Gabriel García Márquez, who was born in Colombia in 1928 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. García Márquez belongs to a group of storytellers who drove the Latin American narrative in the 1960s (known as the Boom).

Key Characteristics of the Boom Narrative

The most significant features of this literary movement can be classified into:

• Magical realism
• The incorporation of the subconscious
• The presence of death
• The breakdown of linear time
• Illogicality
• Experimentation with language
• The sacred meaning of the body

Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Genre and Themes

This is a short novel that blends elements of the news story and detective fiction. It is characterized by magical realism, successfully blending fantasy and reality. The undisputed star of the narrative is the human being undergoing an existential problem.

Narrative Techniques and Time Structure

In this novel, there is a renewal of narrative techniques and subjectivity, as the narrator participates in the events almost as a protagonist. Another example of these renovations is the addition of the subconscious through the interior monologue and the breakdown of time linearity.

The time in this novel is treated retrospectively: the novel begins when the protagonist is already dead, and the novel ends at the time of his death. The structure is not linear, but each time period is reconstructed by the narrator, who is becoming aware of what happened long ago.

Central Characters

The characters central to this fragment are:

• Bayardo San Román: A railway engineer who was wealthy and enjoyed parties. He marries Angela Vicario but divorces her upon realizing she was not a virgin.
• Angela Vicario: The youngest of her family and not a believer. After the wedding, she confesses that Santiago Nasar had been the one who dishonored her.

This snippet of the novel corresponds to the X chapter of the book. In honor, the novel highlights issues such as education.

Linguistic Analysis and Cohesion

The novel belongs to the genre of novels and the journalistic subgenre. The author holds the text together correctly using various mechanisms of cohesion with the language and style employed. The text supports the journalistic subgenre through the language used by the author, which, while full of descriptions and poetic language, achieves a broad aesthetic appeal.

Blending Registers: Refined and Vernacular Speech

Furthermore, the author incorporates a refined language that blends with the vernacular. This popular and educated speech is evident in the passage where the narrator addresses Angela, thus allowing the pain expressed in a popular language (e.g., vernacular expressions) to contrast against religious language used to explain the rest of the story.

Grammatical Devices for Cohesion

The author employs many grammatical devices, such as the use of:

• Personal deixis: (e.g., "what," "you," "your," "his")
• Spatial deixis: ("this")
• Temporal deixis: (e.g., adverbs of time)

Also, the use of ellipsis is a resource to avoid repetition, often resulting in sentences missing a subject. Finally, the text demonstrates a consistent use of verbs that refer to the past, specifically the pluperfect indicative and the imperfect. With these different mechanisms of cohesion, the author gives the book its structural integrity.

The issue raised by the author could relate to ....