What sort of violence is produced by the narratives of religion and politics, their structures and responses and their link to a violent history.

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What sort of violence is produced by the narratives of religion and politics, their structures and responses and their link to a violent history.

Garcia Marquez’s novel Chronicle of a death foretold is written similarly to a classical drama, consisting of five acts and portraying a tragedy. This ritual killing that takes place is repeated three times, with the dissecting of the rabbit guts, the killing and the autopsy. The repeated stabbing of Nasar  and the alarm bells is like a calling from Marquez for the reader to wake up. The form of the narrative feels like Marquez is stabbing the reader with the memory of the book.

Furthermore, each memory of each witness seems to stab in a different place. This chronicle is not straight forward, the investigating journalism runs throughout relinquishing a series of subjective accounts from witness’s. These are individually unreliable, only when unified can the reader begin to address some of the truths. Also Garcia is not only the narrator but a witness and therefore is unreliable due to his emotional connection with events.

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Marquez wrote in first person using omniscient third person effects similar to Joyce’s, but unfamiliar with the latter Marquez uses a technique of disrupted linear narrative. Marquez writes a chronicle not to unfold a mystery but to hide within it deep subversive feelings towards political and religious bodies, similar to Joyce and more recently Trevor Williams. Through this similarity we see how different due to the violence Marquez’s books are.

Each chapter of the book becomes more violent until at the end we get the long drawn out description of the murder. Marquez structures the time flow of ...

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