Ends and Endings in Garcia Marquez's "Cronica de una muerte anunciada" ("Chronicle of a Death Foretold") Author(s): Lois Parkinson Zamora Source:Latin American Literary Review, Jan. - Jun., 1985, Vol. 13, No. 25, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Jan. - Jun., 1985), pp. 104-116 Published by: Latin American Literary Review Stable URL: JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at Latin American Literary Reviewis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLatin American Literary Review This content downloaded from 1.22.185.67 on Fri, 23 Apr 2021 13:55:56 UTC All use subject to
ENDS AND ENDINGS IN GARCIA M?RQUEZ'S CR?NICA DE UNA MUERTE ANUNCIADA [CHRONICLE OF A DEA TH FORETOLD] LOIS PARKINSON ZAMORA And besides, the last word is not said?probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding in tention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pro nounced, would shake both heaven and earth. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad In his most recent novel, Gabriel Garcia M?rquez continues his novelistic exploration of the nature of time and time's end. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the end is neither communal nor political, as it is in One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch, but terribly individual and wholly inevitable. If the historical determinism in social and political institutions is the implicit subject of the earlier novels, this subject becomes explicit as Garcia M?rquez's focus narrows upon the fated nature of the in dividual existence in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The novel depicts the life span not of a society or a political institution, as do the earlier novels, but rather that of a single human being. Alfred J. Mac Adam asserts quite correctly that ?the essential problem of One Hundred Years of Solitude structurally and in its attitude toward history, is duration.?' I would amplify that observation to include the proposition that the essential pro blem in much of Garc?a M?rquez's fiction is how duration ends. My discus sion of Chronicle of a Death Foretold will concentrate upon this point. I have explored in detail elsewhere the ways in which Garc?a M?rquez uses the paradigms of apocalypse to structure and direct One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch.2 In considering the apocalyptic nature of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, it is appropriate to begin with Frank Kermode's observation that the relationship between the
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