Reflective Statement on Antigone

Amogh Sahu

When originally reading Chronicle of the Death Foretold, I was struck by how many different background details were included in the book. From the specific South American Idea of Machismo to the honor crime, this seems very specific to the cultural background, rather than self-contained in the novels world. I needed to understand these aspects in greater detail to get a complete and deep understanding of the book. Take the example of the honor crime. In Chronicle, the Honor crime is at the center of the book, as the murder that the book is based around is considered an honor crime. Therefore, it is useful to go into the ideas and implications of an honor crime. The Interactive Oral helped clear this up for me. An honor crime is a crime committed for honor, and it is a matter between the perpetrator and the victim, and as such should not be interfered with. In the case of the book, the discussion revealed that the crime committed ended up involving the whole town, and clouding the idea of the honor crime contract between perpetrator and victim. This revelation helped change my conception of the motive of the crime from an inexplicable act to a cultural hallmark, putting the crime into its appropriate cultural context. Furthermore, the behavior of the men in the book also seemed quite significant to me originally. The men are portrayed as more hedonistic and less perceptive than the women. The Interactive Oral introduced to me the terms, Machismo and Marianismo, giving a name to my characterization of the two standards of behavior. Machismo refers to the honor code for men, with the values of perseverance, responsibility and honor taking center stage as a standard for male conduct.. Marianismo is a similar construct, referring instead to the semi-divine virginal characterization of young girls, such as Angela Vicario, who was thrown out of her husbands bed for not being a virgin, implying the idealization of the virgin (marianismo) . The cultural context, as given by the interactive oral, helped to unhaze the ideas which originally seemed so trivial and removed from my understanding. I took these cultural aspects as simple idiosyncrasies of the book, rather than hallmarks of the culture. Now, having gained an idea of context, the concepts of the book help me to place it in its context and to more fully understand where it comes from.