“There had never been a death more foretold” (50).
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Premonition
“There had never been a death more foretold” (50).
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“There had never been a death more foretold” (50).
While the majority of works penned by Shakespeare feature prophesied deaths, the deaths of the Clutter family in Capote’s In Cold Blood could also be considered “deaths foretold”. Although their imminent demise is not explicitly spelled out in the pages leading up to their murders, a variety of harbingers obviously suggest the horrifying fate that will soon befall the Clutters. For example, after the author devotes a passage to the enumeration of the mundane activities that occupy the family on the eve of their murders, he often concludes the section with a disclaimer, warning the reader that this will be the last time the Clutters will ever enjoy these hobbies. Furthermore, Capote disperses court testimonies of family friends throughout the opening chapter, explaining their last moments with the Clutters, despite the fact that the narrative has not yet detailed their deaths. Lastly, the title of the novel’s first section, The Last to See Them Alive, confirms the family’s mortality before it occurs.
ReplyDeleteMuch like feeling of foreboding present in In Cold Blood, the sense of premonition that the guarantee of Santiago’s death provides heightens the novel’s suspense. We know that the murder will be committed, but we do not know the precise moment that it will be carried out. This tension is juxtaposed with the fact that, because the murder is essentially set in stone, the reader is resigned to its certainty. We waste no time hoping that the inevitable will not occur and instead regard Santiago as a dead man walking, deceased despite the fact that he has not yet been murdered.
As the author outlines the fate that will befall Santiago at the end of the novel in the first several pages, the reader no longer skims the story to discover what will occur. Instead, we are compelled to continue reading to discover why the murder will occur. Because the audience is acutely aware of the tragedy to come, many events that would otherwise be deemed unimportant take on a new significance as the reader attempts to piece together the circumstances of Santiago’s murder. For example, we pay close attention to the accounts of the weather on the day of the killing, a detail that would likely be considered inconsequential in any other situation. We do the same with the characters that will commit the murder, devoting our attention to their every action, despite how trivial they may seem. The author exploits the reader’s constant scrutiny, providing seemingly frivolous details about the events leading up to Santiago’s death. For example, the scene in which the killers must return from the meat market in order to switch the sharpened knives with their blunt counterparts seems entirely unnecessary, though the author makes a point to chronicle that event.
Out of the three books and one play assigned for summer reading, all include death. One is an unsuspecting death that takes the reader off guard with little precognition: Mama Day. In proof the death has already occurred. In the next two the death is revealed immediately to the reader, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and In Cold Blood.
ReplyDeleteThe very first sentence of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the murder is revealed to the readers. That first line, although not indicting that he has in fact been murdered, “On the day they were going to kill him…”, shows that the plan for his murder is in motion. For me as a reader, I viewed that line as simply a plan to kill Santiago Nasar, not that his death was already set in stone to happen. Further down a line or two, I noted that the tense was in past. “He was always dreaming about trees,” indicates that he no longer dreams about trees, and further past tense structure leads that he no longer dreams at all because he is dead.
I, however, either did not realize that immediately or subconsciously chose to avoid those details until he was murdered. At each new development of the story, I was hoping that someone would tell him, that he would take the gun at his fiancé’s house, or realize that he should go straight to breakfast at Margot’s house, anything to take him off the course of his killers. I found the same reluctance to believe that the murder would happen (or rather be committed by Smith and Hickock) in the other book, In Cold Blood, where the murder was plainly stated to happen before it in fact happened. When the reader invests into the characters, it is human nature to wish that the events won’t happen, even when you have been plainly told that they will.
Knowing the chosen location of his murder, as well as the weapons, allows the reader to know when to pay special attention to details. When the knives are taken away, I breathed a sigh of relief, only to have the two murders retrieve two new weapons. When he stood in the doorway that he would later be killed in, the irony was overwhelming. The reader is most likely rooting for Santiago, at least I was, and therefore whenever the opportunity of intervention arises, the reader is found holding her breath hoping that Santiago will take another path than his predetermined one. These opportunities are what keep the story interesting, as the reader already knows what is set in motion to happen.
George Orwell’s 1984 is an interesting example of a foretold death. In the book, Winston Smith and his lover Julia have committed crimes against the government that they know they will be punished for. Just before they are captured, Winston says, “We are the dead.” Winston began to consider himself dead because he knew that he was going to be captured and killed for his crimes, but he did not know when. However, Winston’s statement not only applies to his situation, but the entire society in which he lives. Eventually, every citizen of Oceania commits “thoughtcrime,” and it is only a matter of time before they are captured and killed. In Winston’s words, the citizens of Oceania are the dead.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and In Cold Blood have a lot of things in common. One major similarity is their structure. In the beginning of both books, the reader is very aware that someone is going to die, but we do not have any details about their deaths. As the books wear on, we discover details about the murders, such as the killers’ motives, the circumstances leading up to the murders, and eventually, the crimes themselves. As I read the book, I knew that Santiago Nasar was going to die. Because I knew his fate, it seemed like his trivial actions on the day of his death were irrelevant. I followed Santiago’s movements through town, but I did not find them essential to the story because I knew he was going to die in the end. In other words, he was a dead man walking. Some of the characters in the book shared my experience. On page 102, the narrator explains that everyone in town looked at them strangely as they walked down the street. The narrator describes their expressions as though he and Santiago “had [their] faces painted.” More blatantly, they probably looked at him strangely because they also knew he was a dead man walking. Sara Noriega was also distraught when she saw Nasar, who she thought was unusually pale, as though he was already dead.
Because the reader is plagued with a dramatic irony of the knowledge of Santiago Nasar's impending death, revealed in the very first sentence of the novel, each word he speaks, act he performs, and move he makes is tainted with a prominent feeling of helplessness and remorse for him. Even if they are trivial and everyday actions, a layer of sadness is present due to Nasar's complete lack of understanding of his tragic fate. There are numerous amounts of works of literature, including the significant examples listed above and by my classmates, that include "deaths foretold," resulting in this similar effect on the reader and how he feels towards the characters and their actions. With that being sad, one particular example comes to my mind in the case of foretold deaths is the novel Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. The foreseen death in this instance, however, is an interesting one in that it is not explicitly revealed in the book, but in real life. The story was based off of a man named Chris McCandless, who died at the end of his treacherous and bold journey alone to Alaska, mirrored in the book. Because the majority of the readers delve into this novel with the knowledge of who it is based off of and his eventual demise, a similar sentiment is conjured to Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Though one becomes fully enthralled and enveloped in the book and characters, it proves challenging to become too invested in the well-being of the protagonist because of the knowledge of his foreboding death, yet also challenging to watch him perish without a little bit of hope. This paradox leaves the reader with feelings mainly composed of sorrow, remorse, hope, and also interest and curiosity for how the character will come to this fate.
ReplyDeleteIn Chronicle, this knowledge of Santiago's death imposed on the reader provides Márquez with an opportunity to play on this curiosity and make the story all the more interesting to fit the story wholly together. Much like beginning at the end of a maze and going backwards, Márquez supplies us with the closing result initially to get us invested in the story and all that occurred in the beginning and middle to result in the death foretold, similar to the feelings of those in the novel who are aware of what is to come as well yet do nothing but spectate and wait to prevent it.
I think everyone has given a fair account of other deaths foretold in literature so I won’t beat it to death (no pun intended) any further. However, the irony is that in life all our deaths are foretold; we will all eventually die. (This may explain the phenomena in writing such books.)
ReplyDeleteFate is obviously pervasive in this book as we were told very early on that Santiago would die. Being told of of Santiago’s death upfront actually took away the suspense in the novel for me, which was only compounded by the fact that there is little reliability in the accounts of the witnesses (if there is disagreement on what the weather was like the day of the murder, how can one take these accounts seriously?), and the fact that this book is fiction and not true. The book started out to be interesting, but as the chapters went by, the suspense faded and the accounts seemed repetitive, which left for me a quite a boring novel. However, knowing Santiago’s fate does spark the interest of the reader in retracing his final few steps, but not enough to salvage a quite frankly disappointing book. Also, leaving an unfulfilled ending (for example, the reader is still left wondering if Santiago was really Angela’s perpetrator) too doesn’t help this book’s cause either.
In agreement with Teaserdale, Ms. Stone answered her own question. Therefore, she did not desire more examples of death being foretold, but rather desired her students to ponder the significance of deaths being foretold in other works of literature. That being said, the sense of premonition in the book really causes the reader to wonder why all this has came about. That sole sense of wonder lasts throughout the book since every detail of the story is not disclosed from every character's point of view until the end. Even though curiousity about the whole development of the story drives the reader, a missing aspect looms over the book as in is being read. The fact that the reader knows the main detail of the story, that Santiago was killed, seems to kill the whole reason for reading the rest of the book. The best analogy I can give is when someone has previously read a book and tells one of their friends about the ending. Is that friend going to want to read the book? Maybe, but the friend certainly feels a lack of interest due to the spoiling of the book. Sure the book was well written and the concept of slowing revealing different aspects of the murder as the story carried on was an original idea, but my motivation for reading the back half of the book was not much more than knowing I was required to read it. If I had more reason to root for Sanitago, other than he was falsely accused by Angela, my interest would have been greater. In knowing that he was going to die eventually anyway, though, I really had a hard time feeling sympathetic for Santiago. It was easy to note the coincidental mishaps that if slightly altered could have prevented his death, but I felt no sympathy. The only thing the premonition did to my reading of his movements is to confirm the question if one of the mishaps would have occurred differently would Santiago still be alive.
ReplyDeleteKnowing that Santiago will die completely changes how the reader reads the novel. When i was reading the novel, I paid more attention to the little details that, if done differently, could have saved Santiago's life. If i had not known for sure whether or not Santiago was killed, I might not have noticed some of these details. Knowing Santiago's fate does greatly lessen the suspense, but this allows the reader to focus on the different aspects of his death better, instead of wondering whether or not Santiago will live.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with Sherman in that I believe that knowing Santiago's fate is not at all like someone spoiling the ending to a different novel. I believe this because in a different novel, the author might want their to be tension and suspense regarding the ending, and wants the reader to wonder about the ending. In a case like this, knowing the fate of the characters does hurt the readers experience greatly because he does not feel the suspense that the author intended. However, in the case of this novel, the author does not want suspense in regards to Santiago's fate, so the reader is not missing out on something that the author wanted him to feel.
In a Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the premonition of Santiago’s death is heard all over town. The twins tell anybody who is near that they intend to kill Santiago. In this story, the foreshadowing of Santiago is blunter than in other stories. Besides the many recounts of death foreshadowing in Shakespeare works, here are some other examples: The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe, and The Book Thief. In The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan’s death was central in the defeat of the white witch. Aslan represented jesus whom in the bible had to die for the sins of his people, so many of the readers knew that he would die but didn’t know when it would happen. While in The Book Thief the deaths were merely foreshadowed to let the readers know something tragic was going to befall Molching, Germany. This made me even more emotionally invested in the characters because in the back of my head I knew they were going to die. It made the happy parts bittersweet in the novel. While the reader knew in both of those books that a death was inevitable, it was just hinted. It keeps the reader on edge with wonder of when the misfortune would fall.
ReplyDeleteMarquez may be blunt about the death of Santiago but he does prolong the crime until the very end of the novel. When reading the beginning of the novel, I thought the crime was about to happen when he walked out the door to see the pope. Instead of reading about the crime right away, the reader was put through many story tellers about the twin’s prelude to the murder. The reader is even taken to the aftermath of the crime before reading Santiago’s side of the story. Even if Santiago died many years before we hear recounts of his reaction when hearing about the twins and when he was murdered. The author makes Santiago’s death seem like fate. Even when everybody knew what was going to happen, it seemed that they couldn’t stop it from happening. It was like it was inevitable. He had to die.
As Janet and Sydney have previously stated, in one of our summer reading books "In Cold Blood" the death of the four members of the Clutter family may not have been explicitly stated but allusions to the crime are made. This gives a thrilling sense of mystery to the book, and waiting for the crime to be committed is a bit excruciating. Also after reading "The Phantom of the Opera" this summer, a death was not foretold but a disappearance. Still the same sense of anxious waiting for the climax of the novel flooded the pages and my mind.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to In Cold Blood and The Phantom of the Opera, yet more intense the sense of suspense is more condensed in the pages of Chronicle of a death Foretold. Instead of the hints of the death of the Clutters or the slow build up to Christine Dae's disappearance, in Chronicle of a Death Foretold the first climax of the novel is reached in the second chapter. From then forward it is a tumultuous roll of the snowball until the ending. One does not have time to stop and take a breath while reading this book. Once you have begun the feeling of anxious foreboding becomes a magnet that draws one in from the first until the last page.
Even though Santiago Nasar's death becomes unavoidable in the beginning of the book, I still found myself holding on to a sliver of hope that he may be lucky enough to survive. Therefore watching his every move was painful. Realizing how many times he was so very close to saving his life glued my eyes to the book in hopes he might be rescued from his tragic fate.
Though not literature, the movie Moulin Rouge (coincidentally my favorite movie of all time) shares the theme of a foretold death. In this movie the viewer is informed that one of the main characters has died within the first five minutes. Knowing this event is going to take place completely alters how one watches the film; whatever happens on screen, in the back of the viewer’s mind is the knowledge that it is all for not. The same takes place in Chronicle of a Death Foretold as the reader reviews the events leading up to the main character’s death.
ReplyDeleteMoulin Rouge, a tragic romance, goes through the events leading up to a leading character’s untimely death. The viewer watches as she passes up opportunity after opportunity to change her fate and save herself from her evidently inevitable end. As each opportunity is presented, the viewer feels a sense of hope at the chance that she might be saved, that the declaration of her death at the beginning of the movie was just a lie. Not only is the viewer granted a false sense of hope, but a sharp feeling of disbelief at the fact that after so many chances the lead character still dies. These emotions are identical to those felt while reading Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
As Gregory said, the reader is also privy to a sense of futility. It seems as if the details of Santiago’s day are all useless, frivolous, and not pertaining to the fact that he was, in fact, killed. It made reading the novel difficult because the details of the events of his day were padding around the grand event: the death. For this reason I would also venture to say that the reader feels impatient and somewhat reluctant to read carefully due to this “death foretold.”
Thomas produces a great point; knowing that Santiago is inevitably going to die urges the reader to focus on the finer details of the book. If the author had not told the reader of Santiago's fate early in the book, one may have missed the changing perspectives of the weather and other finer details, and if this was the authors aim, then he achieved it well. The author does show us an ironic point of life that all death is foretold, so why are we upset that the end is spoiled in the beginning? I believe it is human nature. I agree with JT, taking away the suspense in this book made it a rather boring read. If in every book or movie that the end was revealed most would not be any good because suspense is the driving factor behind nearly all books.
ReplyDeleteTaking this into account, the author may be satirizing literature in this book by poking fun that over thousands of years of stories and novels the majority of them are driven by suspense.
I feel that this discussion is the heart of the novel. Why tell the reader about the death a character? I personally like the fact that we were told about the death at the novel’s start. Most books that we read only keep us intrigued because we are looking for that next point. While I can see what Taylor is saying in that this can make the book potentially boring, I feel that this can also be a genius move by the author. Telling us about the ending allows the reader to examine the work as more than a story. We can truly evaluate the author’s technique and writing style while still being interested in the story. I found myself, much like Thomas, more able to decipher details as the novel progressed. If you want a suspense filled page-turner, you can read a John Grisham book (and I enjoy those very much, it’s just the point of this book differs and requires scholarly insight). In order to truly appreciate a novel, I think it is often times necessary to know the ending. Re-reading books can still be stimulating even though you know the ending. This novel simply reveals the ending, and then allows you do investigate the events leading up to Santiago’s death. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying centers around a woman who dies at the beginning of the novel. This allows us to examine the backwardness and drama that is the Bundren family. Does this provide suspense? Not really, but it makes d**n fine literature.
ReplyDeleteI also enjoy the fact that this book investigates the very thing that scares most of us the most, death. I think that examining death in the context of any story draws the reader into it. We are able to sympathize with death (the feeling is gives us when others die, the fear we feel of it). Marquez’s telling of Santiago’s death allows for a more analytical read regarding the subject of death.