Chronicle of a Death Foretold

I am very interested in the naturalization of honor in this text. Honor is constructed both as a sacred social value and as an inherent compulsion. We are told that "affairs of honor are sacred monopolies" and that "honor is love". In actuality, however, honor is completely counter intuitive and has little to no biological or evolutionary value. Creating a punishment for deflowering a family member is logical because if sexual exchange is not physically or socially contained then one has no way of knowing or even guessing the paternity of a child and valuable resources may be lost in caring for another person's progeny. On the other hand, a far more logical response to one of the richest men in town sleeping with your young sister is the one that Flora Miguel assumes: a shotgun wedding. We know from the narrator's reflections that the outcome of the murder is that the brothers spend a lot of time in jail and that Victoria Guzman spends much of her life unwed and doing clothwork with her mother. Had they forced Santiago to marry Victoria, she would have been married to one of the richest men in town and thus well provided for. She could have had children. Pedro and Pablo could have spent the years while they were in jail providing for their families. Instead, because of this unnatural desire to care for their honor, they rot in a prison cell and Victoria lives the life of a spinster.

The language used in the Chronicle does not describe the Guzman brothers as defending their honor because they need to save face as often as it describes them as defending their honor because they must, they have to, it is the only way. Honor is not just a way of gaining social credit, it is a necessity for life.