Where It All Goes Down
Two Days of a Small Town in the Caribbean Region of Colombia
That sentence has everything you need to know about the setting of Chronicle of A Death Foretold. It might not seem like it has a lot of information, but if you look closer you see that it's a pretty good description that can help you understand just exactly what happened in order for Santiago Nasar to be murdered while everyone in town watched.
Two days
Only a guy like Gabriel Garcia Marquez could take a couple of hours and turn it into a novel. The main event of the novel—the murder—takes place in just two hours on a Monday morning, but Marquez stretches time, moving backwards, and forward, and repeating things until we have the whole story.
You could say that Santiago's death march began six months before his actual murder, when Bayardo San Román came into town. Or you could say that it began on Sunday, when Angela married her mysterious husband and then pointed the finger at Santiago, but that's definitely not where the story ends.
In addition to the short time period of the main event, sometimes the narrator takes us 10 or 20 years into the future while looking for answers in the aftermath of the murder. Unfortunately for him and for us, it doesn't seem that there are any to be found even after such a long time.
Small town
This story could not have happened anywhere except in a small town. Think about it—everyone in this town knows everything about everyone else. (Well, kind of) Just a few hours after the murder plot is hatched, everyone knows about it. The town is so small that everyone can be invited to a wedding and have pieces of the wedding cake sent to them. So that's either the largest wedding cake we've ever seen, or this just a pretty small and close-knit town.
So why does that matter? Well, because Santiago Nasar probably wouldn't have been killed in a city. The insulated nature of the small town makes everyone scared to do anything that would upset the status quo. No one wants to do anything that everyone else isn't doing. In a big city, there are too many people around to worry about that. Somebody would've veered off course and warned Santiago or stopped the Vicario brothers. At least the police would have intervened, if nothing else.
Caribbean Region of Colombia
That's totally vague, isn't it? We're sure there are tons of towns in this area, so this bit of information doesn't seem to tell us much. Or does it?
As it turns out, this bit of information is pretty important for our story.
If you've read 100 Years of Solitude, you've probably noticed that Chronicle of a Death Foretold features some of the same characters from that novel and seems to take place shortly after those events. Several of the characters, like Pedro, took part in the Thousand Days Civil Wars for Colombian independence, something that certainly impacts their daily lives.
But what's important to us is what happened after Colombia's independence. After the wars, Colombia's economy grew and many people from poorer nations immigrated to find a better life in the Latin American country. One of those groups of were people of Arab descent.
This little town has an established community of Arab immigrants, and Santiago's father was one of the first to arrive. By this time, the Arab peoples have been in the community for so long that they have had a second and third generation of children born in Colombia. But despite that, you probably noticed that some people still treat them as outsiders. That probably has more than a little bit to do with why nobody hurried to help Santiago when they found out that Pedro and Pablo wanted to kill him.
Another reason for that? Machismo. This is something that's not just part of the Caribbean region of Colombia, but many Latin American nations. The people in Marquez's small-town adhere very strictly to gender roles. The men are manly men, and the women are girly and delicate flowers. If it weren't for this culture where a woman's greatest honor is her virginity and an assault to honor is punishable by death, the whole affair of Santiago's murder would never have happened. It's hard to imagine this story taking place somewhere like modern-day Ohio, for example, where that sort of culture isn't so common.
Even though Marquez does not spend a lot of time detailing the setting of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, it's easy to see that this setting is very important to understanding just what went on here. Do you think this story could have happened in your hometown?