Santiago Nasar is murdered or rather butchered in public by Pablo and Pedro Vicario. This is to answer for violating the honor of their sister Angelico Vicario, who is wedded by the town’s glamour boy Baynardo Roman. On the very night of the wedding day, Baynardo Roman discovers that Angelico Vicario is not a virgin Pablo and Pedro Vicario go about announcing to the town their intention to kill Santiago Nasar.
There is a long list of people who know what is going to happen; the mother, the daughter, the butchers, the mayor and the policeman Cristodaya, the bishop Maria Adjenna Cervantes, the mulatto girls, Yahlih Gibann, Santiago Nasar’s family and so on. Almost everybody in the town knows about it, but nobody wants to do anything to prevent it. It is as if fiction and reality, the apparent and the imaginary have veiled the town’s psyche.
Everyone seeks refugee in verbosity and dubiousness, in assumption or abstruse logic. Even the victim walks to his death. His end is hastened by his mother who accidentally bolts his path into the house.
Marquez explores the labyrinth of thought, the myriad images of violence and lust that predominate the characters. It is a chronicle, a recording of events. The recording is a very faithful account, 26 years after the original occurrence of events. Even the brothers are clueless as to what their motives are, except for the blind rage that is spurred by their confused notion of honor and family pride.
It is a metaphysical plot, an esoteric event, perfectly arranged by circumstance.
As usual, Marquez is brilliant. He is the master storyteller, weaving secrecy and intrigue into an ordinary tale, imparting the scale of a Greek tragedy to an ordinary murder.