- By understanding the messages authors put into their texts, we are able to experience them ourselves and change our lives for the better. Or it could just be for fun :).

2. How are we affected by literary texts in various ways? How are we impacted by TTTC?
- We can have our emotions or thoughts influenced by literary texts that we read. TTTC helps us to understand some of the things that a war veteran has experienced and his thoughts during the war. This can be used to improve ourselves as well.

3. In what ways is meaning constructed, negotiated, expressed and interpreted in TTTC?
- By explaining his thought process through most of the story, O'Brien is able to express his meaning and purpose in the text.

4. How does the structure of style of TTTC affect its meaning?
- TTTC can be seen as a compilation of short stories. This structure allows the author to provide different messages through each story, helping him to express a larger portion of his thoughts during the war.

tle fortress, behind wire and sandbags, and you don't know 

Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country

—the dirt, the death—I just want to eat it and have 

it there inside me. That's how I feel. It's like this appetite. I 5

get scared sometimes—lots of times— but it's not bad. You 

know? I feel close to myself. When I'm out there at night, 

I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, 

my skin and my fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of 

electricity and I'm glowing in the dark—I'm on fire almost 10

—I'm burning away into nothing—but it doesn't matter be-

cause I know exactly who I am. You can't feel like that any-

where else." 

All this was said without drama, as if to herself, her 

voice slow and impassive. She was not trying to persuade. 15

 For a few moments she looked at Mark Fossie, who seemed 

to shrink away, then she turned and moved back into the 

gloom. 

There was nothing to be done. 

Rat took Fossie's arm, helped him up, and led him out- 20

side. In the darkness there was that weird tribal music, 

which seemed to come from the earth itself, from the deep 

rain forest, and a woman's voice rising up in a language be-

yond translation. 

Mark Fossie stood rigid. 25

"Do something," he whispered. "I can't just let her go like

 that." 

Rat listened for a time, then shook his head. 

"Man, you must be deaf. She's already gone." 

Rat Kiley stopped there, almost in midsentence, which 30

drove Mitchell Sanders crazy. 

"What next?" he said. 

"Next?" 

"The girl. What happened to her?" 

Rat made a small, tired motion with his shoulders. "Hard 35

to tell for sure. Maybe three, four days later I got orders to report 

here to Alpha Company. Jumped the first chopper out, that's 

the last I ever seen of the place. Mary Anne, too." 

Mitchell Sanders stared at him. 

"You can't do that."

Attach some 40 line extracts you have analyzed and may want to use for your IO.
1. Rat shrugged.

He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee.

The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then 

got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. 

He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its 5

back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn't to kill; it was 

to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and 

shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole pla-

toon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but 

there wasn't a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. 10

Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in 

the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal 

letter to the guy's sister, who would not write back, but for 

now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot 

away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was 15

the smell of smoke and filth and deep greenery, and the eve-

ning was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He 

shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the 

belly and butt. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot 

it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried 20

to get up, but this time it couldn't quite make it. It wob-

bled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. 

He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, 

then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo 

was silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where 25

the nose had been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except 

the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and 

dumb. 

Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then 

cradled his rifle and went off by himself. 30

The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby 

buffalo. For a time no one spoke. We had witnessed some-

thing essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece 

of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it. 

Somebody kicked the baby buffalo. 35

It was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes. 

"Amazing," Dave Jensen said. "My whole life, I never seen 

anything like it." 

"Never?" 

"Not hardly. Not once." 40

2. 

- It depends on the style of literary text, however normally it is extremely important and relevant to what is contained in the text. For example, in Hughes' works, they were mostly pertaining to the current situation of persecution due to the Jim Crow Laws.
   2. How does the meaning and impact of a literary text change over time? 

- It changes from a call to action, like Hughes' poems, to a way to learn about the emotions and thought processes of those in the past. It is also a way to inform people of our history and its effects on the people during those times.
      3. How does language represent social distinctions and identities?

- Language is typically the foremost barrier that people have when it comes to talking to people from other cultures, and when people don't have the opportunity to communicate with each other, they start to think of themselves as different from everyone else. Furthermore, by feeling attached to these feelings of individuality, people start to form these kinds of social distinctions and identities.

40 - "Wait, be patient," you say.

The swirl of the bitter river

Carries your "patience" away.

"Disrupter!

Agitator!

50 - Trouble maker!" you say.

The swirl of the bitter river

Sweeps your lies away.

55 - I was given its water

As a gift from you.

Yours has been the power

To force my back to the wall

And make me drink of the bitter cup

60 - Mixed with blood and gall.

You have lynched my comrades

Where the iron bridge crosses the stream,

Underpaid me for my labor,

And spit in the face of my dream.

65 - You forced me to the bitter river

With the hiss of its snake-like song-

Now your words no longer have meaning-

I have drunk at the river too long:

Dreamer of dreams to be broken,

70 - Builder of hopes to be smashed,

Loser from an empty pocket

Of my meagre cash,

Bitter bearer of burdens

And singer of weary song,

75 - I've drunk at the bitter river

With its filth and its mud too long.

Tired now of the bitter river,

Tired now of the pat on the back,

Tired now of the steel bars

80 - Because my face is black,

I'm tired of segregation,

Tired of filth and mud,

I've drunk of the bitter river

And it's turned to steel in my blood.

Dinner Guest: Me 

I know I am 

The Negro Problem 

Being wined and dined, 

Answering the usual questions 

That come to white mind 

Which seeks demurely 

To Probe in polite way 

The why and wherewithal 

Of darkness U.S.A.-- 

Wondering how things got this way 

In current democratic night, 

Murmuring gently 

Over fraises du bois, 

"I'm so ashamed of being white." 

The lobster is delicious, 

The wine divine, 

And center of attention 

At the damask table, mine. 

To be a Problem on Park Avenue at eight

 Is not so bad. 

Solutions to the Problem,

Of course, wait.

Time and Space

- Besides the obvious historical context of slavery that was required for Morrison to even write the book in the first place, There were other racial injustices that occurred which might be tied to the impact made by this book. For example, Beloved was written about 20 years after the end of the civil rights movement, and there was still (as there still is) racial injustice occurring throughout society. This might increase the reception of this book as some people may connect the atrocities occurring in the book to the less obvious current day ones. Without historical or contemporary examples, the story would simply by a confusing story as people might not be able to make any connections to slavery, therefore historical context is necessary when reading the book. At the same time, the book itself acts supplementary to historical context as it allows the readers to catch a closer glimpse into the past and into the atrocities of slavery.

Stamp Paid looked at him. He was going to tell him about

How restless Baby Suggs was that morning, how she had a lis-

Tening way about er; how she kept looking down past the

Corn to the stream so much he looked too. In between ax

Swings, he watched where Baby was watching. Which is why      5

They both missed it; they were looking the wrong way--

Toward water-- andall the while it was coming down the

Road. Four. Riding close together, bunched-up like, and righteous.

He was going to tell him that, because he thought it

Was important: why he and Baby Suggs both missed it. And 10

About the party too, because that explained why nobody ran

On head; why nobody sent a fleet-footed son to cut ‘cross a 

Field soon as they saw the four horses in the twon hitched for 

Watering while the riders asked questions. Not Ella, not John,

Not anybody ran down or to Bluestone Road, to say some 15

New whitefolks with the Look just rode in. The righteous

Look every Negro learned to recognize along with his

Na’am’s tit. Like a flag hoisted, this righteousness telegraphed

And announ ced the fagootm the whip, the fist, the lie, long before

It went public. Nobody warnedthem, and he’d always 20

B elieved it wasn’t the exhaustion from a long day’s gorging

That dulled them, but some other thing--like, well, like meanness--

That let them stand aside, or not pay attention, or tell

Themselves somebody else was probably bearing the news already

To the house on Bluestone Road where a pretty woman 25

Had been living for almost a month. Young and deft with four

Children, one of which she delivered herself the day before she

Got there and who now had the full benefit of Baby Siggs’ 

Bounty and her big old heart. Maybe they just wanted to 

Know if Baby really was special, blessed in some way they 30

Were not. He was going to tell him that, but Paul D was

Laughing, saying, “Uh uh. No way. A little semblance round 

the forehead mauve, but this ain’t her mouth.”

So Stamp Paid did not tell him how she flew, snatching up

Her children like a hawk on the wingl how er face beaked, 35

How her hands worked like claws, how she collected them

Every which way; one on her shoulder, one under her arm,

One by the hand, the other shouted forward into the woodshed

Filled withjust sunlight and shavings now because there

Wasn’t any wood. 40

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_A-s8h3D4L1Vs9XZ19j20xXdgxHen1qBcbwesGU4QCo/edit?usp=sharing
Shackled, walking through the perfumed things honeybees love, Paul D 

hears the men talking and for the first time learns his worth. He has always 

known, or believed he did, his value—as a hand, a laborer who could make

 profit on a farm—but now he discovers his worth, which is to say he learns 

his price. The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his      5 

penis, and his future.

As soon as the whitemen get to where they have tied their horses and 

mount them, they are calmer, talking among themselves about the difficulty 

they face. The problems. Voices remind schoolteacher about the spoiling these particular slaves have had at Garner’s hands. There’s laws against what he        10

done: letting niggers hire out their own time to buy themselves. He even let 

em have guns! And you think he mated them niggers to get him some more? 

Hell no! He planned for them to marry! if that don’t beat all! Schoolteacher 

sighs, and says doesn’t he know it? He had come to put the place aright. Now

 it faced greater ruin than what Garner left for it, because of the loss of two                15

niggers, at the least, and maybe three because he is not sure they will find the 

one called Halle. The sister-in-law is too weak to help out and doggone if now 

there ain’t a full-scale stampede on his hands. He would have to trade this 

here one for $900 if he could get it, and set out to secure the breeding one, her 

foal and the other one, if he found him. With the money from “this here one”               20

he could get two young ones, twelve or fifteen years old. And maybe with the 

breeding one, her three pickaninnies and whatever the foal might be, he and 

his nephews would have seven niggers and Sweet Home would be worth the 

trouble it was causing him.

 “Look to you like Lillian gonna make it?”                                                                       25

 “Touch and go. Touch and go.” 

“You was married to her sister-in-law, wasn’t you?” 

“I was.”

 “She frail too?” 

“A bit. Fever took her.”                                                                                                    30

“Well, you don’t need to stay no widower in these parts.” 

“My cogitation right now is Sweet Home.”

 “Can’t say as I blame you. That’s some spread.” 

They put a three-spoke collar on him so he can’t lie down and they chain 

his ankles together. The number he heard with his ear is now in his head. 35

Two. Two? Two niggers lost? Paul D thinks his heart is jumping. They are 

going to look for Halle, not Paul A. They must have found Paul A and if a 

whiteman finds you it means you are surely lost. 

Schoolteacher looks at him for a long time before he closes the door of the 

cabin. Carefully, he looks. Paul D does not look back.          40

(Toni Morrison, Beloved 267-268)

I could've done it. I could've jumped and

started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt 

a terrible squeezing pressure. Even now, as I write this, I 

can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it—the wind 

coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. 5

You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're 

twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard 

squeezing pressure in your chest. 

What would you do? 

Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? 10

Would you think about your family and your childhood and 

your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? 

Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did? 

I tried to swallow it back. I tried to smile, except I was 

crying. 15

Now, perhaps, you can understand why I've never told 

this story before. It's not just the embarrassment of tears. 

That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much 

more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart.

A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't 20

comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dig-

nity. 

All I could do was cry. Quietly, not bawling, just the 

chestchokes. 

At the rear of the boat Elroy Berdahl pretended not to 25

notice. He held a fishing rod in his hands, his head bowed 

to hide his eyes. He kept humming a soft, monotonous lit-

tle tune. Everywhere, it seemed, in the trees and water and 

sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, 

a crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before. 30

And what was so sad, I realized, was that Canada had be-

come a pitiful fantasy. Silly and hopeless. It was no lon-

ger a possibility. Right then, with the shore so close, I un-

derstood that I would not do what I should do. I would not 

swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. 35

I would not be brave. That old image of myself as a hero, as 

a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a thread-

bare pipe dream. Bobbing there on the Rainy River, looking 

back at the Minnesota shore, I felt a sudden swell of help-

lessness come over me, a drowning sensation, as if I had... 40

(O’Brien 54-55)

hears the men talking and for the first time learns his worth. He has always 

known, or believed he did, his value—as a hand, a laborer who could make

 profit on a farm—but now he discovers his worth, which is to say he learns 

his price. The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his      5 

penis, and his future.

As soon as the whitemen get to where they have tied their horses and 

mount them, they are calmer, talking among themselves about the difficulty 

they face. The problems. Voices remind schoolteacher about the spoiling these particular slaves have had at Garner’s hands. There’s laws against what he        10

done: letting niggers hire out their own time to buy themselves. He even let 

em have guns! And you think he mated them niggers to get him some more? 

Hell no! He planned for them to marry! if that don’t beat all! Schoolteacher 

sighs, and says doesn’t he know it? He had come to put the place aright. Now

 it faced greater ruin than what Garner left for it, because of the loss of two                15

niggers, at the least, and maybe three because he is not sure they will find the 

one called Halle. The sister-in-law is too weak to help out and doggone if now 

there ain’t a full-scale stampede on his hands. He would have to trade this 

here one for $900 if he could get it, and set out to secure the breeding one, her 

foal and the other one, if he found him. With the money from “this here one”               20

he could get two young ones, twelve or fifteen years old. And maybe with the 

breeding one, her three pickaninnies and whatever the foal might be, he and 

his nephews would have seven niggers and Sweet Home would be worth the 

trouble it was causing him.

 “Look to you like Lillian gonna make it?”                                                                       25

 “Touch and go. Touch and go.” 

“You was married to her sister-in-law, wasn’t you?” 

“I was.”

 “She frail too?” 

“A bit. Fever took her.”                                                                                          (Toni Morrison, Beloved 267-268)    
      30

“Well, you don’t need to stay no widower in these parts.” 

“My cogitation right now is Sweet Home.”

 “Can’t say as I blame you. That’s some spread.” 

They put a three-spoke collar on him so he can’t lie down and they chain 

his ankles together. The number he heard with his ear is now in his head. 35

Two. Two? Two niggers lost? Paul D thinks his heart is jumping. They are 

going to look for Halle, not Paul A. They must have found Paul A and if a 

whiteman finds you it means you are surely lost. 

Schoolteacher looks at him for a long time before he closes the door of the 

cabin. Carefully, he looks. Paul D does not look back.          40

(Toni Morrison, Beloved 267-268)

Bystanders are just as responsible as those who commit unjust acts

Men and women have different roles in society

Authority figures are trustworthy individuals who always work to make the world a better place

Religion establishes a more humane and moral society

To separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has

To be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a 

Booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float 5

Outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look

Away and then look back for a moment and then look away

Again, The pictures get humbled; you tend to miss a lot. And

Then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always 

That surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem 10

Untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth

As it seemed.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you

Believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often 15

The crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t. Because the

Normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly

Incredible craziness.

In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. 

Sometimes its just beyond telling. 20

(The Things They Carried 67-68)

The Front door, except for festive occasions,

Remained closed and barred. Nevertheless, it was

There, and not at the read door, that the men who were

Going to kill him waited for Santiago Nasar, and it was 

through there that he went out to receive the bishop, 5

Despite the fact that he would have to walk completely 

around the house in order to reach the docks. 

No one could understand such fatal coincidences. The

Investigating judge who came from Riohacha must have

Sensed them without daring to admit it, for his impulse to 10

Give them a rational explanation was obvious in his

Report. The door to the square was cited several times with 

A dime-novel title: “The Fatal Door.” In reality, the only

Valid explanation seemed to be that of Placida Linero,

Who answered the question with her mother wisdom: 15

“My son never went out the back door when he was 

dressed up.” It seemed to be such an easy truth that the

Investigator wrote it down as a marginal note, but he

Didn’t include it in the report.

Victoria Guzman, for her part, had been categorical 20

with her answer that neither she nor her daughter knew

That the men were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill hum,

But in the course of her years she admitted that both

Knew it when he came into the kitchen to have his coffee.

They had been told it by a woman who had passed by 25

 after five o’clock to beg a bit of milk, and who in addition

Had revealed the motives and the place where they were

Waiting. “I didn’t warn him because I thought it was

Drunkards’ talk,” she told me. Nevertheless, Divina Flor

Confessed to me on a later visit, after her mother had died, 30

that the latter hadn’t said anything to Santiago Nasar because 

in the depths of her heart she wanted them to kill

Him. She, on the other hand , didn’t warn him because she

Was nothing but a frightened child at the time, incapable

Of a decision of her own, and she’d been all the more 35

Frightened when he grabbed her by the wrist with a hand

That felt frozen and stony, like the hand of a dead man. 37

(Chronicle of a Death Foretold 12-13)

Angela Vicario was the youngest daughter of a family of scant resources. Her father, Poncio Vicario, was a poor man's goldsmith, and he'd lost his sight from doing so much fine work in gold in order to maintain the honour of the house. Pure sima del Carmen, her mother, had been a schoolteacher until she married for ever. Her meek and somewhat afflicted look hid the strength of her character quite well. "She looked like a nun," my wife Mercedes recalls. She devoted herself with such spirit of sacrifice to the care of her husband and the rearing of her children that at times one forgot she still existed. The two oldest daughters had married very late. In addition to the twins, there was a middle daughter who had died of nighttime fevers, and two years later they were still observing a mourning that was relaxed inside the house but rigorous on the street. The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get married. They knew how to do screen embroidery, sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy, and write engagement announcements. Unlike other girls of the time, who had neglected the cult of death, the four were past mistresses in the ancient science of sitting up with the ill, comforting the dying, and enshrouding the dead. The only thing that my mother reproached them for was the custom of combing their hair before sleeping. "Girls," she would tell them, "don't comb your hair at night; you'll slow down seafarers." Except for that, she thought there were no better-reared daughters. "They're perfect," she was frequently heard to say. "Any man will be happy with them because they've been raised to suffer." Yet it was difficult for the men who married the two eldest to break the circle, because they always went together everywhere, and they organised dances for women only and were predisposed to find hidden intentions in the designs of men. 

Angela Vicario was the prettiest of the four, and my mother said that she had been born like the great queens of history, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But she had a helpless air and a poverty of spirit that augured an uncertain future for her. I would see her again year after year during my Christmas vacations, and every time she seemed more destitute in the window of her house, where she would sit in the afternoon making cloth flowers and singing songs about single women with her neighbours. "She's all set to be hooked," Santiago Nasar would tell me, "your cousin the ninny is." Suddenly, a little before the mourning for her sister, I passed her on the street for the first time dressed as a grown •woman and with her hair curled, and I could scarcely believe it was the same person. But it was a momentary vision: her penury of spirit had been aggravated with the years. So much so that when it was discovered that Bayardo San Roman wanted to marry her, many people thought it was an outsider's scheming. 

No one would have thought, nor did anyone say, that Angela Vicario wasn't a virgin. She hadn't known any previous fiance and she'd grown up along with her sisters under the rigour of a mother of iron. Even when it was less than two months before she would be married, Pura Vicario wouldn't let her go out alone with Bayardo San Roman to see the house where they were going to live, but she and the blind father accompanied her to watch over her honour. "The only thing I prayed to God for was to give me the courage to kill myself," Angela Vicario told me. "But he didn't give it to me." She was so distressed that she had resolved to tell her mother the truth so as to free herself from that martyrdom, when her only two confidantes, who worked with her making cloth flowers, dissuaded her from her good intentions. "I obeyed them blindly," she told me, "because they made me believe that they were experts in men's tricks." They assured her that almost all women lost their virginity in childhood accidents. They insisted that even the most difficult of husbands resigned themselves to anything as long as nobody knew about it. They convinced her, finally, that most men came to their wedding night so frightened that they were incapable of doing anything without the woman's help, and at the moment of truth they couldn't answer for their own acts. "The only thing they believe is what they see on the sheet," they told her. And they taught her old wives' tricks to feign her lost possession, so that on her first morning as a newlywed she could display open under the sun in the courtyard of her house the linen sheet with the stain of honour. 

She got married with that illusion. Bayardo San Roman, for his part, must have got married with the illusion of buying happiness with the huge weight of his power and fortune, for the more the plans for the festival grew, the more delirious ideas occurred to him to make it even larger. He tried to hold off the wedding for a day when the bishop's visit was announced so that he could marry them, but Angela Vicario was against it. "Actually," she told me, "the fact is I didn't want to be blessed by a man who cut off only the combs for soup and threw the rest of the rooster into the garbage." Yet, even without the bishop's blessing, the festival took on a force of its own so difficult to control that it got out of the hands of Bayardo San Roman and ended up being a public event. 

THE LAWYER STOOD BY THE THESIS OF homicide in legitimate defence of honour, which was upheld by the court in good faith, and the twins declared at the end of the trial that they would have done it again a thousand times over for the same reason. It was they who gave a hint of the direction the defence would take as soon as they surrendered to their church a few minutes after the crime. They burst panting into the parish house, closely pursued by a group of roused-up Arabs, and they laid the knives, with clean blades, on Father Amador's desk. Both were exhausted from the barbarous work of death, and their clothes and arms were soaked and their faces smeared with sweat and still living blood, but the priest recalled the surrender as an act of great dignity. 

"We killed him openly," Pedro Vicario said, "but we're innocent." 

"Perhaps before God," said Father Amador.

"Before God and before men," Pablo Vicario said. "It was a matter of honour."

Furthermore, with the reconstruction of the facts, they had feigned a much more unforgiving bloodthirstiness than really was true, to such an extreme that it was necessary to use public funds to repair the main door of Placida Linero's house, which was all chipped with knife thrusts. In the panopticon of Riohacha, where they spent three years awaiting trial because they couldn't afford bail, the older prisoners remembered them for their good character and sociability, but they never noticed any indication of remorse in them. Still, in reality it seemed that the Vicario brothers had done nothing right with a view to killing Santiago Nasar immediately and without any public spectacle, but had done much more than could be imagined to have someone to stop them from killing him, and they had failed. 

Pedro Vicario, according to his own declaration, was the one who made the decision to kill Santiago Nasar, and at first his brother only followed along. But he was also the one who considered his duty fulfilled when the mayor disarmed them, and then it was Pablo Vicario who assumed command. Neither of the two mentioned that disagreement in their separate statements to the investigator, but Pablo Vicario confirmed several times to me that it hadn't been easy for him to convince his brother of their final resolve. Maybe it was really nothing but a wave of panic, but the fact is that Pablo Vicario went into the pigsty alone to get the other two knives, while his brother agonised, drop by drop, trying to urinate under the tamarind trees. "My brother never knew what it was like," Pedro Vicario told me in our only interview. "It was like pissing ground glass." Pablo Vicario found him hugging the tree when he came back with the knives. "He was in a cold sweat from the pain," he said to me, "and he tried to tell me to go on by myself because he was in no condition to kill anybody." He sat down on one of the carpenters' benches they'd set up under the trees for the wedding lunch, and he dropped his pants down to his knees. "He spent about half an hour changing the gauze he had his prick wrapped in," Pablo Vicario told me. Actually, he hadn't delayed more than ten minutes, but this was something so difficult and so puzzling for Pablo Vicario that he interpreted it as some new trick on his brother's part to waste time until dawn. So he put the knife in his hand and dragged him off almost by force in search of their sister's lost honour. 

"There's no way out of this," he told him. "It's as if it had already happened." 

They left by way of the pigpen gate with the knives unwrapped, trailed by the uproar of the dogs in the yards. It was beginning to get light. "It wasn't raining," Pablo Vicario remembered. 

"Just the opposite," Pedro recalled. "There was a sea wind and you could still count the stars with your finger." The news had been so well spread by then that Hortensia Baute opened her door precisely as they were passing her house, and she was the first to weep for Santiago Nasar. "I thought they'd already killed him," she told me, "because I saw the knives in the light from the street lamp and it looked to me like they were dripping blood." One of the few houses open on that misbegotten street was that of Prudencia Cotes, Pablo Vicario's fiancee. Whenever the twins passed by there at that time, and especially on Fridays when they were going to the market, they would drop in to have their first cup of coffee. They pushed open the door to the courtyard, surrounded by the dogs, who recognised them in the half light of dawn, and they greeted Prudencia Cotes's mother in the kitchen. Coffee wasn't ready yet. 

It was a massacre, performed at the public school with the help of the druggist, who took notes, and a first-year medical student who was here on vacation. They had only a few instruments for minor surgery available and the rest were craftsmen's tools. But despite the havoc wrought on the body, Father Amador's report seemed in order and the investigator incorporated it in the brief as a useful piece of evidence.

Seven of the many wounds were fatal. The liver was almost sliced in pieces by two deep cuts on the anterior side. He had four incisions in the stomach, one of them so deep that it went completely through, and destroyed, the pancreas. He had six other, lesser perforations in the transverse colon and multiple wounds in the small intestine. The only one he had in the back, at the level of the third lumbar vertebra, had perforated the right kidney. The abdominal cavity was filled with large clots of blood, and in the midst of the morass of gastric contents appeared a medal of gold that Santiago Nasar had swallowed at the age of four. The thoracic cavity showed two perforations: one in the second right rib space that affected the lung, and another quite close to the left armpit. He also had six minor wounds on his arms and hands, and two horizontal cuts: one on the right thigh and the other in the abdominal muscles. He had a deep stab in the right hand. The report says: "It looked like a stigma of the crucified Christ." The encephalic mass weighed sixty grams more than that of a normal Englishman, and Father Amador noted in the report that Santiago Nasar had a superior intelligence and a brilliant future. Nevertheless, in the final note he pointed out a hypertrophy of the liver that he attributed to a poorly cured case of hepatitis. "That is to say," he told me, "he had only a few years of life left to him in any case." Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn, who in fact had treated Santiago Nasar for hepatitis at the age of twelve, recalled that autopsy with indignation. "Only a priest could be so dumb," he told me. "There was never any way to make him understand that we tropical people have larger livers than greenhorn Galician Spaniards." The report concluded that the cause of death had been a massive haemorrhage brought on by any one of the seven major wounds. 

Much later, during an uncertain period when I was trying to understand something of myself by selling encyclopaedias and medical books in the towns of Guajira, by chance I got as far as that Indian death village. At the window of a house that faced the sea, embroidering by machine during the hottest hour of the day, was a woman half in mourning, with steel-rimmed glasses and yellowish grey hair, and hanging above her head was a cage with a canary that didn't stop singing. When I saw her like that in the idyllic frame of the window, I refused to believe that the woman there was who I thought it was, because I couldn't bring myself to admit that life might end up resembling bad literature so much. But it was she: Angela Vicario, twenty-three years after the drama . . . 

She was reborn. "I went crazy over him," she told me, "out of my mind." She only had to close her eyes to see him, she heard him breathing in the sea, the blaze of his body in bed would awaken her at midnight. Toward the end of that week, unable to get a moment's rest, she wrote him the first letter. It was a conventional missive, in which she told him that she'd seen him come out of the hotel, and that she would have liked it if he had seen her. She waited in vain for a reply. At the end of two months, tired of waiting, she sent him another letter in the same oblique style as the previous one, whose only aim seemed to be to reproach him for his lack of courtesy. Six months later she had written six letters with no reply, but she comforted herself with the certainty that he was getting them. 

Mistress of her fate for the first time, Angela Vicario then discovered that hate and love are reciprocal passions. The more letters she sent the more the coals of her fever burned, but the happy rancour she felt for her mother also heated up. "Just seeing her would turn my stomach," she told me, "but I couldn't see her without remembering him." Her life as a rejected wife continued on, simple as that of an old maid, still doing machine embroidery with her friends just as before she had made cloth tulips and paper birds, but when her mother went to bed she would stay in the room until dawn writing letters with no future. She became lucid, overbearing, mistress of her own free will, and she became a virgin again just for him, and she recognised no other authority than her own nor any other service than that of her obsession. 

But most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and did not consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honour are sacred monopolies, giving access only to those who are part of the drama. "Honour is love," I heard my mother say. Hortensia Baute, whose only participation was having seen two bloody knives that weren't bloody yet, felt so affected by the hallucination that she fell into a penitential crisis, and one day, unable to stand it any longer, she ran out naked into the street. Flora Miguel, Santiago Nasar's fiancee, ran away out of spite with a lieutenant of the border patrol, who prostituted her among the rubber workers on the Vichada. Aura Villeros, the midwife who had helped bring three generations into the world, suffered a spasm of the bladder when she heard the news and to the day of her death had to use a catheter in order to urinate. Don Rogelio de la Flor, Clotilde Armenta's good husband, who was a marvel of vitality at the age of eightysix, got up for the last time to see how they had hewn Santiago Nasar to bits against the locked door of his own house, and he didn't survive the shock. Plلcida Linero had locked that door at the last moment, but with the passage of time she freed herself from blame. "I locked it because Divina Flor had sworn to me that she'd seen my son come in," she told me, "and it wasn't true." On the other hand, she never forgave herself for having mixed up the magnificent augury of trees with the unlucky one of birds, and she succumbed to the pernicious habit of her time of chewing pepper cress seeds. 

Twelve days after the crime, the investigating magistrate came upon a town that was an open wound. In the squalid wooden office in the town hall, drinking pot coffee laced with cane liquor against the mirages of the heat, he had to ask for troop reinforcements to control the crowd that was pouring in to testify without having been summoned, everyone eager to show off his own important role in the drama. The magistrate was newly graduated and still wore his black linen law school suit and the gold ring with the emblem of his degree, and he had the airs and the lyricism of a happy new parent. But I never discovered his name. Everything we know about his character has been learned from the brief, which several people helped me look for twenty years later in the Palace of Justice in Riohacha. There was no classification of files whatever, and more than a century of cases were piled up on the floor of the decrepit colonial building that had been Sir Francis Drake's headquarters for two days. The ground floor would be flooded by high tides and the unbound volumes floated about the deserted offices. I searched many times with the water up to my ankles in that lagoon of lost causes, and after five years rummaging around only chance let me rescue some 322 pages filched from the more than 500 that the brief must have contained. 

Santiago Nasar left. The people had stationed themselves on the square the way they did on parade days. They all saw him come out, and they all understood that now he knew they were going to kill him, and that he was so confused he couldn't find his way home. They say that someone shouted from a balcony: "Not that way, Turk; by the old dock." Santiago Nasar sought out the voice. Yamil Shaium shouted for him to get into his store and went to get his hunting gun, but he couldn't remember where he'd put the cartridges. They began to shout at him from every side, and Santiago Nasar went backward and forward several times, baffled by hearing so many voices at the same time. It was obvious that he was heading toward his house as if to enter through the kitchen door, but suddenly he must have realised that the main door was open. 

"There he comes," said Pedro Vicario. 

`They'd both seen him at the same time. Pablo Vicario took off his jacket, put it on the bench, and unwrapped his knife, holding it like a scimitar. Before leaving the store, without any agreement, they both crossed themselves. Then Clotilde Armenta grabbed Pedro Vicario by the shirt and shouted to Santiago Nasar to run because they were going to kill him. It was such an urgent shout that it drowned out all the others. "At first he was startled," Clotilde Armenta told me, "because he didn't know who was shouting at him or from where." But when he saw her, he also saw Pedro Vicario, who threw her to the ground and caught up with his brother. Santiago Nasar was less than fifty yards from his house and he ran to the main door. 

Five minutes before, in the kitchen, Victoria Guzman had told Plلcida Linero what everybody already knew. Plلcida Linero was a woman of steady nerves, so she didn't let any sign of alarm show through. She asked Victoria Guzman if she'd said anything to her son, and she lied honestly, since she answered that she still hadn't known anything when he came down for coffee. In the living room, where she was still scrubbing the floor, Divina Flor at the same time saw Santiago Nasar come in through the door on the square and go up the open stairs to the bedrooms. "It was a very clear vision," Divina Flor told me. "He was wearing his white suit and carrying something that I couldn't make out well in his hand, but it looked like a bouquet of roses." So when Plلcida Linero asked about him, Divina Flor calmed her down. 

a) physical description

b) why does he want to marry Angela?

c) actions that reveal his character?

1.    How does honor become a major theme in this story beginning with this chapter?

2.    Describe the irony found in the sentence “We killed him openly . . . but we’re innocent” (49).  How is this kind of statement similar to ones used by Garcia Marquez throughout the novel? 

3.    What do the recurring and contradictory accounts of the weather on the day of Santiago’s death add to the story (61)?

4.    How is the characterization of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, who owned, operated, and worked at the town’s brothel (around the 64-65) ironic (think about her “job” and the way she and her house were described)?

5. Motif: diffusion of responsibility -- bystander effect. What does the fact that nearly everyone knows (except Santiago) what is planned tell us about the fundamental values of the town?

Ch.5 Notes

Evening song - Langston Hughes

A woman standing in the doorway

trying to make her where-with-all

come here, baby, darlin'!

Dont you hear me call?

If i was anybodys sister

id tell her, gimme a place to sleep

but i aint nobodys sister

im just a poor lost sheep

Mary mary mary

had a little lamb

well, i hope that lamb of marys

dont turn out like i am.

end.

Morning - Charlotte Delbo

to know when her mother died.

Hallucinating processions pass by. These are the women who died in the night, taken

from the charnel houses to the morgue. They are naked on stretchers fashioned roughly from

branches, stretchers far too short. The legs- the shinbones- hang over the side with their thin,

bare feet at the end. The head hangs over the other side, bony and shaven. A tattered blanket is

thrown across the middle. Four prisoners carry the stretchers, one at each handle, and it is true

that you go feet first, this was always the direction in which they carried the corpses. They walk

with difficulty in the snow or the mud, and fling the body on the pile near block 25. They return

with an empty stretcher, hardly less heavy, and pass again with a new corpse. It is their work

every day, their everyday work.

I watch them go by and brace myself. A while back I was surrendering to death. Each

dawn I experience the same temptation. When the stretcher passes by, I brace myself. I wish to

die but not to be carried on the small stretcher. Not to be carried by on the short stretcher with

hanging legs and head, naked under a tattered blanket. I do not wish to be carried on the small

stretcher.

Death is reassuring. I would not feel it. “You’re not afraid of the crematorium, so what is

there to fear?” How fraternal death can be. Those who depicted it as hideous never saw it.

However, revulsion wins out. I do not wish to pass by, carried on the small stretcher.

I know then that all those who pass by are passing for me, that all those who died died for

me. I watch them passing and I say no. To slide into death, here, in the snow. Let yourself slide.

No, because there is the little stretcher. I do not wish to pass by carried on the small stretcher.

The dark is completely dissolved. It is colder now. I hear my heart beating and I speak to

it just as Arnolphe spoke to his. I talk to my heart.

When will the time come when I will no longer have to be in charge of my heart, my

lungs, my muscles? When will this enforced solidarity between the brain, the nerves, the bones

and all the organs we have in our belly cease? When will the time come when we will no longer

know one another, my heart and me?

The red of the sky fades and the sky grows pale. Far off, in the livid sky, black crows

appear, swooping down over the camp in dense flocks. We await the end of roll call.

We await the end of roll call to go off to work.