Colección: INTERAMER
Número: 64
Año: 1998
Autor: Isabel Rodríguez Vergara
Título: Haunting Demons: Critical Essays on the Works of Gabriel García Márquez

Summary

My reading of Chronicle of a Death Foretold conforms to my initial thesis: the novel as satire. Seen in this way, Chronicle is a plurivalent text that holds many voices heard simultaneously: many texts in contention that can only be read through intertextuality. Chronicle subverts its own notion of genre by parodying—destroying—the genre of chronicle itself and the genre of detective novels; in the final analysis, it subverts the very  notion of the relationship between life and art differing from that of fiction, in that it cannot arrive at absolute truth. The novel nullifies the reader’s illusion of seeking “facts.”  Rather, Chronicle encourages the reader to focus his attention on the creative process of fiction, that is, on language. The religion through which Santiago Nasar represents Christ, thus turning the novel into a sacred the judicial system, suggesting that it is an inoperative system, whose purpose is vengeance and whose code is fictional. The very maner in which the story is presented, on one hand giving characters and exact times in which the events take place, implies a parody of the shown, it parodies  detective novels. The only possible reading of the text, therefore, is the metaphorical one.