Chapter 2
(pp. 25-47) Events surrounding the wedding.
1. Who is Bayardo San Román? How is he presented? What do we learn about him and his family? From whom? Why does he want to marry Angela Vicario?
2. Who is Anglea Vicario? What is her family like? What are Angela’s feelings toward Bayardo?
3. What is the significance of the farmhouse of Xius? What does it represent?
4. How is the wedding described?
5. What happens when Angela is returned to her parent’s house (pp. 45-47)? How do the characters react? How does the narrator know what happened?
1. How do Pablo and Pedro Vicario defend their actions? Do they feel any remorse?
2. Why does the narrator say, “There has never been a death more foretold” (57)? What actions and events demonstrate this? In other words, how does the behaviour of the brothers and the other characters and the manner in which they react/justify themselves in knowing that the twins were out to kill Santiago (Faustino Santos, Clotilde Armenta, the policeman, Colonel Aponte, the narrator’s brother) not prevent Santiago Nasar’s death?
3. What disagreement do the brothers have? Which one actually makes the decision to carry out the plan?
4. Why does Prudencia Cote and her mother approve of the twins’ plan to kill Santiago?
5. Who is María Alejandrina and what is her relationship to Santiago Nassar and to the narrator? What does she represent in the work?
Chapter 4
(pp. 72-95) What became of…?
1. Referring to the autopsy, why does Father Amador say that “It was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead” (72) and later, the narrator calls it a “massacre”?
2. What ocurrs to the Vicario brothers while they are in jail? Why were the brothers afraid of the Arab community and why were there fears unfounded? What is the Arab community like?
3. What became of the Vicario family after the murder? The father, Poncio Vicario? The twins? Why do you think they left town?
4. Why did the majority of the town believe that the only victim was Bayardo San Román? Why not Santiago or Angela? What becomes of Bayardo? Why do his mother and sisters make such an extreme public display of mourning? Who or what are they mourning?
5. What happens to Angela Vicario? How has she changed according to the narrator? In what way is she “reborn”?
6. What are the two reasons that led to Bayardo’s discovery that Angela was not a virgin?
7. Identify references or images to death in Chapters 2-4.