Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Chronicle of a Death Foretold question 3

One of the many perspectives gathered by the narrator of the day Santiago was murdered was given by his mother, Placida Linero. Placida tells the narrator that a week before he was murdered, her son had dreamed he was in a tinfoil airplane flying through almond trees. Placida was known to be able to interpret dreams and she did not interpret any danger from her son's dream. The last time Placida saw Santiago he had been wearing all white and leaving the house to welcome the bishop to their village. Placida also recalled that the day Santiago died it had been raining. Later in the novel, after Victoria Guzman tells Placida that Santiago is going to be killed, Placida sees the Vicario brothers running towards the house and not having seen her son running in front of them, she shut the door seconds before Santiago was able to enter the house. Thinking her son was upstairs in his room shouting down to the Vicario brothers, Placida runs to his room and does not notice that her son has already been killed. The narrator gathered this information by interviewing Placida 27 years after the murder had taken place. Using Placida's memory, the narrator gathers this information and connects it to the memories of other individuals he has interviewed. This source could not be reliable because it is a source gathered from a 27 year old memory. While Placida remembers it was raining that day, several other people remember it being a sunny day, proving that not all memory is reliable. What Garcia Marquez is trying to shows through the use of these different perspectives is that memory is not always trustworthy.

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