Chronicle of a Death Foretold

"She only took the time necessary to say the name. She looked for it in the shadows, she found it at first sight among the many, many easily confused names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written. 'Santiago Nasar,' she said" (47).

I chose this quote because I think it embodies a little bit of the magic realism theme that Professor Mufti was discussing in lecture. So here we have Angela Vicario telling her twin brothers the name of the man that stole her honor, or virginity, from her. The image of the butterfly nailed to the wall is emblematic of both Angela’s and Santiago Nasar’s doomed fate. With the accusation that Santiago was her perpetrator, Angela forced the hand of the community to allow, whether by sheer negligence, coincidence, or the actual act of killing, for his death to occur based on the community’s cultural moral values that give the defense of honor as a just means to kill a man. Angela represents the butterfly as well because if she doesn’t say a name, then her family will be furious at her for allowing the taker of her honor to roam the streets. Her culture views women to be creatures of servitude and to openly ignore the question that her brothers asked her about her perpetrator's name would be frowned open indubitably.

Another interesting aspect of this quote is the way in which Marquez describes Angela’s thought process as she reaches for Santiago's name to tell her brothers. He says that “many, many easily confused names” came to her mind from both the world of the living and the dead. This image now created of a butterfly harmonizing with this suggestion of both living and dead names floating around in Angela’s psyche is kind of magical. This use of magic realism seems to work against the journalistic style of the novel and blurs what is actually happening. Just how we don’t really know the whole story of Santiago’s death and why everyone thought it was unnecessary to warn him, we also get this dreamlike version of Angela’s thought process when she’s trying to accuse her offender, so we never find out if her story is true. This scene reveals the distractive haziness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s literary techniques that can be seen throughout the novel.