Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Blog Post No. 4)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Genre: Crime Fiction

Number of pages read: 80/120

Summary: In the twenty pages I read since my last blog post, the book describes the Vicario brothers' pursuit for Santiago Nasar. They travel the streets of the small Caribbean village. Marquez reveals that Pablo, the older brother, listens to Pedro's orders. This is because the Pedro went to the military, and his soul and body hardened from the discipline. He wears his wound from a bullet as a medal and proudly shows it. Pedro has a urinating problem, so after he urinates beneath the tamarind trees. He describes the pain he feels as "pissing ground glass" (Marquez, 61). After this, Pedro could not carry on his search for Santiago Nasar, so he told his brother to continue without him. Pablo camped in front of the back door of Santiago Nasar's house and looked through the window to see if the lights were on in his room. Luckily, Santiago Nasar went in through the front door which was on the other side. The lights on the staircase were already turned on, so Santiago did not have to turn on any more lights. He knew that he had only one hour of sleep before the bishop arrives, so he went to sleep in his street clothes. When he woke up, he went out the back door of his house. Pablo stabbed him to death. Many people from the village looked at the body. There were seven fatal cuts and many more smaller cuts. The body could not be recognized. Nobody could find a freezer big enough for his body, so they left him in the open part of the living room and put many fans around him to keep him cool, but the temperature was so high that it was no use. Father Amador and a medical student performed autopsy over his body. First, they got his guts out and threw them into the garbage. In his guts, they found a golden medal that he had swallowed when he was four years old. The medical student diagnosed that he would have only had a few more years to live if they had not killed him.

Reflection: In this part of the book, there were no time shifts. Everything was very straightforward. I liked the action and the descriptions in the book. I was disgusted when I read the part where Marquez describes the wounds on Santiago Nasar's body. Pablo must have been mentally ill, for he committed a very monstrous crime.

Passage: "They had only a few instruments for minor surgery available and the rest were craftsmen's tools." (Marquez, 75)

I chose this passage because it perfectly describes the poverty of the village. They do not even have the proper tools for urgent medical purposes, a freezer for keeping corpse or any urgent means of transportation to places with the adequate tools and materials.