Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold Summary | Chapter 1 Summary

This story is chronicled from the third person omniscient perspective. Santiago Nasar is a wealthy young man of Arab descent, who lives in his mother's home in a Latin country. On the morning of his death, he awoke very early and told his mother that he'd had a dream about how happy he was walking through a grove of trees, but when he woke up he felt that he was covered in bird droppings. His mother was known to interpret dreams but didn't see anything unusual in what he told her. He dreamt about trees a lot, she would later remember.

On this particular Monday morning, he was groggy from too little sleep, but that was to be expected due to the wedding festivities of the past few days. Most of the people who saw him early that morning would remember later that he had been in a very good mood. This was at 6 a.m. An hour later, he was dead.

In anticipation of the bishop's arrival that morning, Santiago dressed in white linen pants and a shirt, in hopes that he would have the opportunity to kiss the bishop's ring. His mother would recall later that he asked for some aspirin for a headache and left the house by the front door, the door he always used when he was dressed up. Unfortunately, he didn't see the envelope on the floor that contained a warning of his imminent murder.

The men who were waiting to kill Santiago were asleep on benches near a milk shop, with their knives wrapped in newspaper and held close to their chests. The two soon-to-be-murderers were the twins Pedro and Pablo Vicario. They were still dressed in the clothes from their sister's wedding yesterday. The proprietress of the shop remembers how ghostlike Santiago appeared that morning in his white clothes, and how she begged the Vicario brothers not to go ahead with their plan. For a few seconds, they hesitated as they watched him cross the town square.

The bishop's boat never docked. He simply waved and blessed the crowd from the upper deck. Santiago felt particularly cheated, because he had contributed loads of wood to the local church and had personally chosen the capons to be presented as gifts. It was widely known that the bishop's favorite dish was rooster comb soup.

Most of the people in the square that morning knew that Santiago was targeted for murder, but when they saw him milling about in the square, they believed that he had escaped or that it had possibly been a terrible rumor. The gossip turned to talk of that morning's other startling news. Angela Vicario's new husband returned to her family, because she was not a virgin. No one had yet made the connection between the two stories that morning, but it was Angela's brothers who were waiting to kill Santiago.