Chapter five (96-120)
1. How would you explain the beginning paragraph of the chapter (p. 113)? What is the “single common anxiety” of the townspeople?
2. How does Santiago’s mother free herself from the guilt of having barred the door? From what does she not free herself?
3. The narrator relates his attempts to locate the legal brief, provides descriptions of the magistrate in charge of the investigation and of the judge who presided over the trial. What do we learn from these? What is your opinion about the legal process in the case of Santiago? What remains to be the real mystery central to the trial?
4. What does the judge mean when he writes “he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature” (p. 116)?
5. What reasons does the narrator give to demonstrate his belief that Santiago’s behavior was proof of his innocence? How do Polo Carillo, Meme Loiza and Fausto Lopez interpret Satniago’s behavior that morning?
6. Explain Cristo Bedoya’s attempts to warn Santiago and why they all fail.
7. How does Santiago’s fiancée react to the news? Why does she react in this way?
8. Who finally informs Santiago that the Vicario brothers are waiting to kill him and how does he react?
Honor: role of men, women, the sacrificial victim or scapegoat
Reconstruction of the past
Portrayal of women
Tensions between social and racial classes
Political background
Consider the following:
Role of memory: inconsistencies, contradictions
Role of texts: oral testimony, the legal brief, letters
Signs/omens: “My sister felt an angel pass” (20); powers of divination
Revenge of the dead: Santiago, wife of Xius
Bird motifs: Divina Flor
Religious symbolism: names (Cristo Bedoya) “It looked like a stigma of the crucified Christ” (87)
Images of Death:
“The Fatal Door” (11)
“Like the hand of a dead man” (13)
“You always have to take the side of the dead” (25)
“cult of death” (34)
“I felt as if the drowsiness of death had finally been lifted from me” (52-53)
“it was the soul in torment of a slave ship” (77)
“that Indian village of death” (102)
“to make Angela Vicario die in life” (103)
the murder (139-143) but killed many times throughout the work