Chronicle of a Death Foretold Essay | Critical Essay #1

Chronicle of a Death Foretold Critical Essay #1

Lilburn, a graduate student at McGill University, is the author of a study guide on Margaret At-wood's The Edible Woman and of numerous educational essays. In the following essay, he discusses the narrator's attempt to construct a chronicle that recaptures the past.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a seemingly simple story about the murder of a young man in a small Colombian town. Written in a factual, journalistic style, the novel is told by an unnamed narrator who returns to his hometown twenty-seven years after the crime to "put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards." Assuming the role of detective, or investigative reporter, the narrator compiles and reports the information that he collects from the memories of the townspeople he interviews. What he finds, however, is a town full of people with varying and often conflicting memories of the...
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