“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 always been written” (47).
I
think this is one of the best passages in the book. What is your
favorite sentence so far? What do you like about it? What makes it
great?
The excerpt provided above is, in my opinion, by far the most appealing passage in the novel. Found at the end of the second chapter, the paragraph details the accusation that follows the revelation of Angela Vicario’s shameful secret of lost purity. A family consumed with the preservation of honor, Angela’s brothers demand that she produce the name of the guilty individual so that the pair can avenge Angela by killing the man who robbed the bride of her innocence. Angela’s reply implicates Santiago Nasar, explaining and, in a sense, justifying the murder that the reader is anticipating. With this excerpt, the chronicle’s blind beginning is resolved, and the reader now understands that Santiago’s murder is not entirely baseless: a life must be taken in order to restore lost honor. The lyrical diction of the paragraph partnered with the complex rhetorical devices employed in the passage combine to produce my favorite passage in the narrative.
ReplyDeleteAs the narrator describes Angela’s declaration, he juxtaposes a telegraphic sentence with a verbose one, used to elaborate upon its terse counterpart. I believe that the author does this to lengthen the fleeting event that he describes in the first sentence, prolonging the instant in the reader’s mind while evoking vivid imagery by likening the abstract notion of a thought to concrete objects- a butterfly pinned by a dart. The mental picture formed in response to the passage is memorable, a characteristic vital in a successful metaphor. Furthering the fantastical feeling of the paragraph, the author implies that Angela conjures names of those dead, as well as those living. The idea of oscillating between the two drastically different dimensions of life and afterlife is as haunting as it is poetic.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the passage is the overarching significance of the metaphor likening Santiago’s unfortunate situation to a butterfly immobilized by a dart. This simile not only aptly illustrates the victim’s plight but also depicts Angela’s dilemma. Trapped by her brothers’ insistent inquiries regarding the culprit responsible for her vanishing virtue, Angela would have been accused of defending the dishonorable man had she refused to name the criminal. Furthermore, the analogy serves to aid the narrator in implying that Santiago is not, in fact, the individual guilty of the crime. The passage clearly states that Angela considered many names to convincingly identify as the man responsible, suggesting that she would prefer for the person truly accountable to remain unknown. A more important piece of evidence, though, is the allusion to dart throwing- an activity that, no matter how well-rehearsed, is wholly random in outcome. This insinuates that the designation of Santiago as the man at fault was an almost incidental occurrence.
“’…because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was all something dirty that shouldn’t be done to anybody, much less to the poor man who had the bad luck to marry me.’ So she let herself get undressed openly in the lighted bedroom, safe now from all the acquired fears that had ruined her life. ‘It was very easy,’ she told me, ‘because I’d made up my mind to die’” (91).
ReplyDeleteThis passage takes place near the end of the novel when Margot’s brother has gone back to visit Angela Vicario and is attempting to gain new information on what happened twenty-three years prior. In all honesty, I like the entire couple of pages that involve Angela’s and her recounts. Margot’s brother, who is narrating, is quick to point out how “mature” and surprising in the way that she “ended up understanding her own life.” These are both true. Angela presents the information simply and honestly, “…she never made any mystery out of her misfortune.”
Angela is easily one of my favorite characters because of this ease to tell the truth without frill. She effortlessly states what happened and how it made her feel, the outcome and the effects her actions had on others. I specifically like the above passage because it aptly captures exactly how well she can explain the past. Her unbiased diction shows how she knew what was right and what was wrong, and even what fell in the middle. Angela was faced with a very difficult set of obligations and customs. She had to choose between keeping her family name while fooling her husband and ruining her name but remaining on honest terms with her husband. Courageously she chose the latter all while knowing the consequences that would follow, “I’d make up my mind to die.” Above all, I like this passage for the great example of her courage in the face of adversity. I congratulated her choice to be honest, to not fool her husband into believing she was something she wasn’t. At the time, she knew that she did not love him, but she had the respect, even the decency, to not attempt to trick him into believing something so sacred.
“Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold” (99).
ReplyDeleteThis passage takes place when the narrator finds part of the documents from the court case in a flooded building. The judge for the case often wrote marginal notes in ink that looked like “blood”, and they were very literary in their form. What seemed to strike the judge most, by the look of his notes, about the whole case was what the narrator states in the passage. Santiago’s death was so foretold that it almost seemed like something from bad literature because it was so cliché, in a way that everything that needed to go wrong did. This is ironic because it is indeed part of a novel, yet a whole story is formed around Santiago’s foretold death.
I really like this sentence because, in a way, it references the novel from within. It seems virtually impossible to the judge, as it did to me while reading, that Santiago’s death was not prevented. It was almost foretold, as stated in the title, by the fact that everyone seemed to know he would be murdered except for him. Most people knew for hours, yet his death was still fulfilled. The judge, who is a supposed expert on literature, thinks it wounds like a bad plot for a novel, when in fact it is the story we are reading.
I find this passage great for two reasons. First, we find a reference to the title of the book and the story within, which shows how awfully and blatantly foretold Santiago’s death really was. Also, I enjoyed the fact that Marquez took the “forbidden” element of literature he wrote of and made it into an entire novel. Instead of making his death secretive, he made the reader feel more pain for Santiago by knowing so clearly he would die, and that he should have been warned by one of the many people in his town to easily have prevented his death.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete“For the immense majority of the people there was only one victim: Bayardo San Román. They took it for granted that the other actors in the tragedy had been fulfilling with dignity, and even with a certain grandeur, their part of the destiny that life had assigned them” (83).
ReplyDeleteThere are two things in this passage that I found fascinating. The first was that most people in the town saw Bayardo as the only victim in this story. This says a lot about the culture in which this story is set. Many readers would assume that Santiago Nasar was the primary victim in this story because he was brutally murdered. The town however, thought that Bayardo was the victim because his honor was on the line. It is interesting that the town values a man’s honor over everything else, even his own life. This shows why Santiago’s alleged love affair with Angela justified the Vicario brother’s crime in their own mind as well as the collective opinion of the community. The next aspect of this passage that I found interesting involves the diction of the passage. Márquez called the other central characters “actors” in the “tragedy” that was the plot of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In other words, he is saying that Bayardo San Román is the central character of the novel, and that Angela, Santiago, Pedro, Pablo, and the other central characters of the book took a backseat as they “fulfill with dignity” their “assigned” roles in the story. I find this fact interesting in light of the structure of the book. Most books end with the central character. That is simply a trend in literature because it makes the most sense in most cases. However, if we assume that Bayardo is the main character, as this passage suggests, the novel does not end with the main character. Bayardo’s story ends on page 95 when he returns to Angela with all of the letters that she wrote to him, but there are still twenty five pages in the novel after this scene. These twenty five pages play back the hours before Santiago is killed, ending with the gory details of his death. In fact, the chapter in which Bayardo returns is the only chapter that does not take place on the day of the crime or the day before. It is set many years in the future. Why does Márquez choose to interrupt the story to tell us that Bayardo ultimately returns to Angela? In my opinion, he did this to make Santiago’s death even more tragic because it was in vain. Santiago did not have to die, because Bayardo returned to Angela. Whether or not he was killed, Bayardo would have come back, and that is why the author tells us this before he gives us the details of his death. As we read of Santiago Nasar’s death, we are appalled at the crime’s brutality, but we are doubly appalled because his death was in vain. The inclusion of this scene also makes Bayardo the central character of the book, which I explain in my response for the “reunion” prompt.
"The family took it not only seriously but with great excitement. Except Pura Vicario, who laid down the condition that Bayardo San Roman should identify himself properly. Up till then nobody knew who he was. His past didn't go beyond that afternoon when he disembarked in his actor's getup, and he was so reserved about his origins that even the most demented invention could have been true. It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as troop commander, that he had escaped from Devil's Island, that he'd been seen in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he'd salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward Passage. Bayardo San Roman put an end to all those conjectures by a simple recourse: he produced his entire family."
ReplyDelete(32-33)
This is paragraph showed how easily stories can be misinterpreted, and quite frankly, signaled to me the reader that nothing can really be taken seriously any further in this book, except the bare fact that Santiago is dead. From these farfetched “conjectures,” how can one take any of citizens’ accounts of Santiago’s death seriously (especially from the narrator’s perspective twenty years later)? There may be truth in some of the accounts, but it is impossible to determine which are and aren't, if any; it is quite an ambiguous situation. Had I not been forced to read this book, I probably would have stopped reading it at this point because now I knew the author’s purpose in writing this this chronicle: showing how stories can change, be misinterpreted, and that sometimes the truth can never be revealed.
There were an innumerable amount of sentences in Chronicle of a Death Foretold that caught my attention and hindered my eyes from reading further in order to fully delve into the configuration and meaning behind them, the above passage being one of those. By utilizing metaphor to compare Santiago's ill-fated situation to a hopeless and immobilized butterfly, Marquez underscores the inevitable tragedy of Santiago's fate stemming from Angela's predicament in the dire need to maintain the family's honor.
ReplyDeleteThis sentence was beautifully and scrupulously written from the syntax to the imagery and the diction, but by far the most memorable and striking sentence in the book for me can be found on page 31: "She devoted herself with such spirit of sacrifice to the care of her husband and the rearing of her children that at times one forgot she still existed." Though this sentence is bereft of a plethora of tactful rhetorical devices, its simplicity and significant meaning give it not only an entrancing quality but a sense of understanding. The lack of punctuation and flowing quality of the sentence iterate even further the imperative significance behind it, and the apt cadence woven throughout with the utilization of alliteration of "s"'s with the phrase "such spirit of sacrifice" gives it an aesthetically pleasing sound underscores the level of sacrifice that she makes for her family. In a mere 28 words, this sentence provides the reader with an immense amount of knowledge pertaining to their family and particularly the culture he was striving to capture, all with a simple and lovely splendor.
"He died without understanding his own death." p. 101
ReplyDeleteThis compact sentence presents so many things worthy of thought. This sentence is in the book because once Santiago finally learns of the plot to kill him, he stumbles back to his house in shock and bewilderment. He had no idea why the brothers were hunting him down, and he had no reason to know. If he was guilty of taking Angela's virginity, he would understand their feeling of duty to kill him, and ultimately understand his own death, or so Marquez rationalizes. This rationalization raises the question of "Would he have understood his death even if he was guilty?" and then "Does anyone truly understand their death?" I guess in certain cases when someone was being put to death the person might could understand their death, but I would argue that no one understands their death. Unless one's religious beliefs could alter this feeling, death is an ambiguous concept that most have trouble understanding. Regardless of what the reader gets out of this quote, I think it is a strong sentence that provokes a great deal of thought.
"'All right, girl,' he said to her, trembling with rage, 'tell us who it was.'
ReplyDeleteShe 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 always been written.
‘Santiago Nasar,' she said."
P.47
This is after Angela was beaten by her mother and the twins get home. When Pedro ask her who took her virginity, Angela is looking for a way out of her torment, and giving them a name is the only way out. This passage allows the reader to get inside Angela's head and what she is thinking when she condemns Santiago. She does not want to give up the name of her secret lover, knowing that he will be killed, so she says the first name that comes to her mind, which she picked out of the shadows of the haze she was surely in after being brutally beaten. It also shows how Santiago was sentenced to death for something he had nothing to do with when the narrator says "she nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written." Santiago did nothing to warrant his death, and this sentence accurately compares him to a peaceful butterfly that did nothing wrong, but can do nothing to prevent his untimely death.
“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 always been written” (47)
ReplyDeleteThis was Santiago Nasar's death sentence. We find this passage soon after Angela's impurity was discovered. After having been asked by her furious brothers "All right, girl, he said to her, trembling with rage, tell us who it was.", the reader knowing Angela's prideful family would seek nothing but revenge, could not help but feel a sense of pity for whose name would be stated. However, not only does this passage determine Santiago Nasar's fate, but also the toxic cadence drew me to choose this one.
I agree this passage is the most aesthetically pleasing. The apt diction and the metaphor are also what drew me to it. In the metaphor the dart pins the butterfly to the wall. The dart being the killers, Pedro and Pablo, and the unsuspecting butterfly, Santiago Nasar. When the passage states "whose sentence has always been written." This implies the sheer lack of control the butterfly has over his own fate. His fate having been decided the moment Angela decided who her "perpetrator" would be. With just one name the course of the novel has been decided.
Not only is the metaphor lethally beautiful. The diction is striking. The phrase "well-aimed" gives an insight into Angela's decision. The tension proceeding the finding of the correct name "She looked for it in the shadows, she found it at first sight among the many", must have been so thick one could cut it with a knife. One could question whether Angela knew if her declaration would end in the unlucky man's demise. I believe the phrase "well-aimed" again can contribute to this answer. The seemingly malicious connotation creates a false sense of determination to blame a man. Yet when the passage states " many easily confused names from this world and the other" it seems as if Angela was only searching for a name that could possibly make sense to her brothers. I do not believe she purposely sought for Santiago Nasar's name.
This passage simply shocked me. The comparison of Santiago Nasar trapped by a dart, or one could say trapped by his own name, gave a sense of foreboding throughout the rest of the novel, this making the book all the more compelling to read.
P. 76: “They gave us back a completely different body. Half of the cranium had been destroyed by the trepanation, and the lady-killer face that death had preserved ended up having lost its identity. Furthermore, the priest had pulled out the sliced-up intestines by the roots, but in the end he didn’t know what to do with them, and he gave them an angry blessing and threw them into the garbage pail.”
ReplyDeleteI chose to take a closer look at this passage for a number of reasons. When I first read these couple sentences, they struck me as comedic, but when I further dissected them I noticed subtle devices and nuances that prove the brilliance of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I feel as though this passage accurately represents Marquez’s literary style. Though much of the tone has been lost in translation, the general feeling of this novel is one of a journalistic history of the day on which Santiago died. To begin this passage he uses a terse sentence which summarizes what is said in the next two, much lengthier, detailed sentences. This is a very common device and creates a tone that almost sounds like an essay or news piece.
Next, I took note of the play on words with the “lady-killer face that death had preserved.” This pun is overlooked at first, but with a bit more examination, the reader realizes that Marquez chose these words very carefully. Marquez personifies death while paralleling it with the “lady-killer face,” a face that is now, coincidentally, dead. It is hard to discuss the effect this twist of words has on this passage because it is such a barely noticeable device, but it exemplifies the author’s strong command of the written language as well as adding to the fantastical theme of the novel.
The last reason why I wanted to discuss this passage was the priest’s angry blessing of the intestines. Though the scene is not a pleasant one, few people can claim to enjoy autopsies, Marquez wrote it with a whimsical and comedic tone. The image of the exasperated priest, the clammy medical student, and the queasy assistant is clearly painted in the reader’s mind thanks to Marquez’s use of detail and frank, factual information. Also funny is the fact that the priest thought to bless the intestines at all, nonetheless an angry blessing before chucking them in the trash can. Though a bit sacrilegious, these short details made me love this passage.
"The family took it not only seriously but with great excitement. Except Pura Vicario, who laid down the condition that Bayardo San Roman should identify himself properly. Up till then nobody knew who he was. His past didn't go beyond that afternoon when he disembarked in his actor's getup, and he was so reserved about his origins that even the most demented invention could have been true. It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as troop commander, that he had escaped from Devil's Island, that he'd been seen in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he'd salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward Passage. Bayardo San Roman put an end to all those conjectures by a simple recourse: he produced his entire family."
ReplyDeleteJT is right on here. This passage shows that their is little validity coming from the characters or the narrator. All of the characters saw this story play out, yet their stories are all different.This could be intentional satirization of the court system by the author. Each witness could be telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" yet all of their stories are different in their own right. How could this be? Each character has a different perspective in this novel and all may be correct, but none may be what actually happened. I believe this is nothing more than satire coming from the author about the court system.
“For the immense majority of the people there was only one victim: Bayardo san Roman. They took it for granted that the actors in the tragedy had been fulfilling with dignity, and even with a certain grandeur, there part of the destiny that life had assigned them.” –p.83
ReplyDeleteI find this passage interesting because it has deep implications about the culture of the people. One would think that Santiago is the only victim, that is what our culture has led us to believe, but it turns out that the man with his honor on the line is the true victim. The culture of the people, along with a lot of cultures in the past put a strong price on a man’s honor. It is also a cool concept to think of ourselves being assigned a destiny, and if not a full destiny a piece of one. Much like the author telling the reader the character dies it seems that a character’s destiny is already assigned before they fulfill it. The concept of predestination has a strong presence in this novel. The tragedy of the death is also magnified by telling the reader of it before hand. Someone’s destiny is more poignant if it is already known.