In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the reliability of the narrator is suspect as he relays the tragicomic story while adopting an omniscient and bias persona despite being a character in the story, creating a sense of ambiguity in regards to the murder.
By relaying the story 27 years later, the narrator’s primary source of information is the amalgamation of memories of the townspeople, who all have contradicting and non-linear remembrances of the event. “Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea breeze… but most agreed that the weather was funereal, with a cloudy, low sky” (García Márquez 4). The memories of that morning for the individuals reporting the information is the reality they remember or simply the reality they choose to report to the narrator, making the reader unsure of which viewpoint to …show more content…
“It was strange that she hadn't known, but it was even stranger that my mother didn't know either, because she knew about everything before anyone else in the house” (García Márquez 20). The narrator claims that his relatives were the only ones who were not informed about the murder and could not have done anything to stop it. It is ironic how everyone but his family has the ability to prevent the murder and can be seen as guilty. “He went to the bathroom before going to bed, but he fell asleep sitting on the toilet, and when my brother Jaime got up to go to school he found him stretched out face down on the tile floor and singing in his sleep. My sister the nun, who wasn't going to wait for the bishop because she had an eighty- proof hangover, couldn't get him to wake up” (García Márquez 70). Once again, the narrator employs bias to justify why people in his family did not know about the murder. He recreates events that may or may not have happened and the reader cannot know exactly what to
By relaying the story 27 years later, the narrator’s primary source of information is the amalgamation of memories of the townspeople, who all have contradicting and non-linear remembrances of the event. “Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea breeze… but most agreed that the weather was funereal, with a cloudy, low sky” (García Márquez 4). The memories of that morning for the individuals reporting the information is the reality they remember or simply the reality they choose to report to the narrator, making the reader unsure of which viewpoint to …show more content…
“It was strange that she hadn't known, but it was even stranger that my mother didn't know either, because she knew about everything before anyone else in the house” (García Márquez 20). The narrator claims that his relatives were the only ones who were not informed about the murder and could not have done anything to stop it. It is ironic how everyone but his family has the ability to prevent the murder and can be seen as guilty. “He went to the bathroom before going to bed, but he fell asleep sitting on the toilet, and when my brother Jaime got up to go to school he found him stretched out face down on the tile floor and singing in his sleep. My sister the nun, who wasn't going to wait for the bishop because she had an eighty- proof hangover, couldn't get him to wake up” (García Márquez 70). Once again, the narrator employs bias to justify why people in his family did not know about the murder. He recreates events that may or may not have happened and the reader cannot know exactly what to