In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the unnamed narrator sets out in apursuit to compile the remaining pieces of truth surrounding the murder ofSantiago Nasar, twenty-seven years after the event. As the narrator recounts a series of facts relating toSantiago’s death, however, the reader becomes aware of the futility of this effort, as the collection of pastinformation cannot encompass or recreate the experience itself. Evaluating both the narrator’s desire to revisitthe past and the foretold events leading up to Santiago’s death, the narrative explores the ways in which the pastand the future impose upon present existence and assign meaning to the individual’s experience. In addition, asthe narrator uses the form of a chronicle to organize time into a confined segment, he engages in an historicalinquiry of both the murder of Santiago and the nature of time itself.
Through the chronicle’s limited ability toaccount for the impositions of past and future, time emerges as an entity that resists and calls into question thislinear segmentation constructed by human beings
