Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle, right…let’s get after it.

First, thoughts for which I don’t need text references.
The narrator. I like and don’t like not knowing his motivation. That probably means that I’m intrigued. He falls outside my most recent paradigm for admirable narrators, as he doesn’t try to give energy to the storytelling. In fact, as objective as he is, he probably takes energy out of the story. I found myself wanting him to contextualize the testimony of other characters, to correct their errors. I mean, was it raining or not raining? Characters disagree on the weather, but he doesn’t tell us that anyone is wrong.

But let’s get at motivation. On the one hand, he was tight with Santiago Nasar. It makes sense, then, that he would try to get at the truth, try to justify for himself whether or not he was justly killed. On the other hand, he refers to his project as a chronicle, way of arranging the facts in their accurate order. He doesn’t refer to his task as investigation or inquiry, and do he doesn’t aim at a conclusion or a verdict. At the end, he implicates himself through his use of the first-person plural, but I’m not sure that his chronicle is a search for absolution.

Let’s get at the whole sexual jealousy thing. To me, the most striking irony in the text is Pedro Vicario’s gonorrhea. To piss painfully, or not at all, and to have the painful pissing delay by half an hour the murder you’re going to commit because someone had sex with your sister – well, that’s an irony I can enjoy. The acid-scarred faces of Afghani women, the stoned to death rape victims (do I mean adulterers, fornicators?) of Pakistan and Jordan: these women are a buzzkill to my delight in irony.

And yet, the narrator treats Senora Cervantes as a goddess, as do all the boys who learn from her the arts of love. He makes two references to having sex with her in language that is refined and poetic, just as, perhaps, the experience was. I highlighted them, but I can’t remember them now.

Anyway, in what kind of insular world must I live to have my sense of self wrapped up in a woman’s virginity? I understand the discomfort that comes from awareness that the one you’re with had a sex life prior to her awareness of your existence. Somewhere there is likely rooted an insecurity among men that you’ll be compared to a previous lover, or that your partner did something with someone else that you don’t want to picture her doing – maybe something you did with someone you didn’t quite respect as much. Worst case scenario: what if she enjoyed doing something she doesn’t do with you? And if you’re prone to judgment, then wishing won’t make her “prior bad acts” inadmissible in the courtroom of your psyche. And so you’ll want to control her, to make sure not only that she doesn’t do what you don’t want her to do, but also that she doesn’t even think about it.

Are the most masculine men the most insecure? If they are, is it because they have the farthest to fall? Just look at Bayardo San Roman – not the fat, greasy guy at the end, but the Renaissance man who arrives mysteriously in this backwater town while the narrator is off at college. Look at Othello and his search for strawberries. If that bitch was unfaithful to me before she even knew I existed, well, I’ll kill her, dammit.

The worse irony of the situation is the harshness with which women police other women. Yes, they have their secrets, their ways of getting around the laws dictated by the insecurities of men, but they judge as harshly as any vulnerable swordsman.