The world of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is one in which the daily lives of the characters are based on a code of ritual and honor. Because of this Garcia Márquez's story is not only a chronicle of a death, but also a chronicle of a culture, an examination of rituals and consummations, of expectations and actions. It is a portrait of the cultural machine that would eventually cause Santiago Nassar's, and we come to see that his death was neither destiny nor random occurrence, bur the culminating point of a series of rituals. Santiago Nassar's murder was an expected ending, but not guaranteed.

In this story, Garica Márquez lays out a series of events next to one another, each leading into the next and eventually...