honor killings

The central action which shapes and informs every page of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the murder of the twenty-one-year-old aristocrat, Santiago Nasar, by the Vicario brothers in a “legitimate defense” of their sister’s honor. The novel consists of a detailed history of the circumstances of the murder taken by the narrator, a journalist and former friend of the victim, twenty-seven years after the incident in question. The long range effects of this murder on the citizens of the small unnamed Latin American town in which it occurs, and their tacit complicity in the crime itself, are revealed in the course of the narrator’s history. In the end, the question of whether Santiago Nasar actually deserved his fate remains unanswered. Why he was killed, how his death could have been prevented, the moment-by-moment events leading up to the crime, and the final brutal act are meticulously set down but, finally, the narrator is unable to come to any conclusions despite all the evidence he has amassed.