The construction of gender [masculinity], in Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, with regard to Santiago Nasar, is something which warrants closer examination. The text constructs masculinity with an indirect focus in the case of the narrator’s tardy account of his friend’s, Santiago’s, last hours before his death.
The text illustrates the different ways in which masculinity can be constructed. Whether it is through the theory that gender is ideological, it is a disguise to which everyone is subjected, or that the more absolute the characteristics of masculinity are portrayed the more such characteristics become arbitrary, and disputable.
Santiago Nasar is a man whose concept of masculinity is shaped by his environment, experiences, societal expectations, and his interactions with those to whom he is close. Nasar is one whose masculinity is purely constructed through the subjective, secondhand accounts of those who knew him and lived in the same community as he and his mother.
Compassion as a Flaw
One of Nasar’s flaws is his compassion. The morning of his murder, when he is seated at the table and Victoria Guzman is eviscerating a rabbit, Nasar chastises her and asks her to not be a savage. He asks her to make believe that the rabbit was a human being. The reason Guzman found Nasar’s reaction so difficult to understand may be a combination of the facts that Nasar was supposed to be a man, and that he was someone who was used to hunting – likewise an act of killing; yet seemingly to Nasar not as savage.
Society does not often view men to be squeamish individuals; if they are viewed as such, then they are automatically labeled as some condescending term not becoming of a man. Similarly, Nasar’s masculinity is called into question due to his reaction and comment.
The Role of Disguise: Male or Female
The audience is told that Nasar had a tremendous talent for disguises. His favorite pastime was to confuse the identities of the mulatto girls. He would go through the wardrobes of some of the girls to disguise the others, and, as a result, the girls ended up feeling as though they were different from each other and, at the same time, like the others that they weren’t.
Nasar’s fascination with dressing the girls up to resemble one another is something which could be interpreted in more than one way; and each interpretation puts Nasar’s masculinity in a different light. Though he enjoys supervising the dressing up of the girls he does not partake in dressing as one of the girls. This distinction is very important. Normally for a man of his age, the fascination would be getting the girls out of their clothes, as opposed to in them.
However, Nasar’s interaction with the girls could be his way of expressing his enjoyment of seeing the girls dressed up. Or to put it another way, this fascination could be Nasar’s way of expressing his own ideals as to what he feels women should look like; what turns him on – a way of his being intimate with these women without the element of intercourse. In this way, Nasar is exercising his tendencies toward drag in a heterosexual sense.
Nasar’s talent of disguise is another element of his personality, and taste, which one could use to further support the idea of his gravitation to the realm of femininity. His fascination with disguise can be traced back to his early adolescence.
Beating as a Rite of Passage—and Regret
When Nasar’s father caught him with a prostitute, he roused Nasar from the bed by beating him with a whip and, after the fact, isolated him for more than a year. Nasar’s father’s actions had to have had a tremendous psychological impact on the way that Nasar viewed the act of sex, as well as his own masculinity.
For his father to show such dominance, as though Nasar were a treasured daughter, coupled with Nasar’s immediate submission, which lasted the duration of his ‘incarceration,’ had to also have influenced Nasar’s interpretation of what it meant to be a man. In many cultures it is a rite of passage for a male to lose his virginity. The act becomes a male’s way of saying that he is a man. However, in Nasar’s case, though it was at a fairly young age, it was a time for Nasar to say “I am a man, and I am sorry.”
Growth Through Reflection
Though he obviously later adopted his ‘lady’s man’ type of personality, the traumatic event involving the prostitute and his father had some bearing on the way he viewed sex, relationships and his own male identity. As a result, his fascination with the pastime of dressing the girls could very possibly have been, in his eyes, a safe outlet for his love of the female gender as well as his own carnal satisfaction.
Nasar’s masculinity is not necessarily called into question, but the situations surrounding his maturation and eventual embrace of what he had become remains uncertain; the audience only has the word of others on which to form their opinion of him. His character is a masterpiece of various opinions, recollections, observations, and memories that would be difficult to duplicate if given any other circumstance.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.
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