Analysis of Chapter 2 of The Chronicle Of A Death Foretold Essay

Chapter 2

Analysis

Though Santiago's death is treated as an astonishing and unjust occurrence, Garcia Marquez hands down no simple condemnations in his novel. Every character is flawed and complicated, containing some portion of blame for the sequence of events that culminates in the murder. Chapter Two focuses on one of the most complicated of all these characters: Bayardo. Mysterious, wealthy, reclusive, soft-spoken but with an iron will-Bayardo is difficult to pin down. The narrator says that "he seemed to me like a very sad man," while Luisa Santiaga claims, "He reminded me of the devil" (granted, no one else in the story senses evil in Bayardo). Bayardo is at once capable of ostentatious displays of love and charm and also of ruthless selfishness-as in his transaction with Xius, whom he badgers into selling his home, eventually killing the man.

We also may want to condemn Bayardo for returning Angela, but the way in which he does it, with a soft-spoken thank you to Angela's mother, is strange and unsettling-perhaps engendering a measure of sympathy in the reader. Garcia Marquez does not make Bayardo or Angela simply condemnable any more than he makes Santiago purely loveable (recall Santiago's sexist molesting of Divina Flor, his servant). This is a pattern repeated throughout his novel-and indeed, in many of his other works as well. All of his characters contain obvious imperfections; all share in ultimate guilt but all deserve a measure of the readers' sympathy as well. His purpose, then, is not to blame individuals, but to invite us to consider larger intersections of fate, society, community, and memory.

Which is not to say that the individuals in the novel aren't interesting. Rather, they are full of mystery and strangeness-which Garcia Marquez highlights by using unconventional narrative techniques. For instance, the narrator pointedly mentions that Bayardo San Roman went missing for two hours prior to his wedding, only to arrive "the perfect image of a happy bridegroom." In most novels, we would learn what went on in that two-hour interval, but in this novel we never do. Perhaps there is something strange and significant in his absence, perhaps not-Garcia Marquez leaves his novel open to such loose ends, knowing that human life is full of such unexplainable details. His novels-containing both surreal coincidences and their opposite, purely random asides-recreate the perplexity of everyday life: of meaning formation itself.

The chapter closes with Angela's absurdist beating at the hands of her mother-whose rage is so violent that she nearly kills her daughter, yet so controlled that she never makes a sound during the beating. Pura beats her daughter with the same combination of steeliness and propriety that she herself displays-she can't forgive her daughter, it seems, for doing what she would never have done: for surrendering herself.

As for Angela's confession, the narrator makes two things clear: both Santiago's likely innocence and Angela's relative freedom from blame. He writes, when Pedro asks her who did it, that she "only took the time necessary to say the name. She looked for it in the shadows, she found it at first sight among the many, many easily confused names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has even been written." Santiago's name is picked from the "shadows"-any man's name would have done as well (which implies, perhaps, that all men, as complicit in the patriarchal society that values her only for her virginity, share some blame for what follows). As in so many later events, Santiago is "like a butterfly" pinned to a wall (which, later, he in fact is, by the twins' daggers) by random fate. Angela needs a name in order not to be beaten to death, and the name that comes to her, for whatever reason, is Santiago's.