Different aspects of the work Chronicles of a Death Foretold (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) had helped me understand the Colombian culture.

My initial thoughts on the Colombian culture started with the town itself, giving an impression that it has an old style community.  The men have a higher status over the women; the society has different values and beliefs in comparison to ours today. I learned that this was the perspective that the narrator was giving us, and the characteristics and identity of the culture were concealed with a mask.

 The role of men and women were valuable towards my learning of the oral presentations I have understood through the oral presentations that women aren’t so powerless as they seem, and come out as the aggressors.  The women are the emotional leaders as they are the ones telling the men what needs to be done.  They are supposed to be pure according to biblical references and have a pressure from society but can be deceptive. Instead women have shown to be more emotionally powerful and not as submissive as we first observed.  One of the examples we looked at, as a class was Angela Vicario telling her brothers who had taken her virginity.  Angela, whose name means an angel, could be showing her side of deception trying to regain her honour but we will never know the truth if she gave the right name to her brothers.

The importance of honour within their society was a crucial discussion topic, which was vital to understanding the murder of Santiago Nasar.  The honour that the Vicario brothers were hunting to redeem ruined the town as a whole.  Throughout the discussion of the interactive orals, I have established a new comprehension towards honour, that they’re two different kinds, Community Honour and Personal Honour.  Community honour represents the honour of the town, and personal honour represents the honour of a citizen inside the town and there must remain a balance between the two.

In conclusion the interactive orals have given me a different perspective other then the narrators towards understanding Marquez’s non-chronological work and his techniques and writing styles.