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Narrative Structure In Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

1368 Words6 Pages
As a brick house relies on a stable structure to support the house, a story relies on a narrative structure to not only support but to add to the overall story. In contrast to the traditional linear storytelling, Chronicles of a Death Foretold has a circular structure; the narrator takes the reader on a journalistic investigation (also known as an inverse detective) which keeps time looping back upon itself. Each section starts and ends within a few hours, the action of the novel is covered, but with this, the story goes off in digressions, flashbacks, and flashforwards, with the different people 's accounts of what happened. Marquez’s wordsmanship is impeccable, and despite the confusion, many may encounter, the story is extremely tight. We learn about the histories of numerous characters and get a basic character profile of each character detailing, their backgrounds leading up to Santiago 's death, and the reader learns about where life took them after his death. The way in which Gabriel García Márquez structures the story in Chronicles of a Death Foretold is pivotal to the telling of the story and this is due to how each element of the structure, such as circular, journalistic investigation, flashbacks, flashforwards, and digressions, add to the telling of the story. To start with, circular structure is a literary narrative structure in which completeness does not come to the traditional "conclusion", such as when in the book The Stranger the book leads up to
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