Objective Truth and Initial Conditions: Positioning The Chronicle of a Death Foretold in Postmodern Literature

Maria Saju

Maria Saju National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli

Keywords: postmodernism, chaos theory, objective truth, simulation, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Abstract

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has often been regarded as a postmodernist writer in lieu of his works that pertain to the realm of magic realism. This paper, by means of close reading, is an attempt to situate his short novel The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a story of the premeditated murder of a young Arab that takes place in a small Colombian coastal town, in postmodernism, by exploring the alternate avenues of objective truth and initial conditions, through parallel readings of the movies Vantage Point and The Butterfly Effect (director’s cut). Furthermore, the exploration of anamorphosis, journalistic narration, Baudrillard’s third-order simulation, and Chaos theory in the texts discussed helps delineate the postmodern poetics present in the works.

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Author Biography

Maria Saju, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli

Maria Saju is a postgraduate student of English Language and Literature at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. She has previously published fiction in Kendra Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, and poetry in an anthology called Pen-Ink. She also has a self-published collection of poetry called Upma for Anaemia.

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