Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Peripheral Narrator):
Don't you just love our sketchy unnamed narrator? He's supposed to be Santiago's friend, but it seems that he spends most of his time enjoying the services of the town's prostitutes:
I was recovering from the wedding revels in the apostolic lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, and I only awakened with the clamor of the alarm bells, thinking they had turned them loose in honor of the bishop. (1.2)
Shouldn't he be out warning his friend? Also, didn't he just get engaged at the wedding? We wonder how his new fiancée would feel about him having sex with other women several times a day.
So that's weird, but it doesn't actually affect our understanding of the story. What does affect it is the fact that our unnamed narrator seems to be pretty biased. The only characters that he is certain are telling the truth are those closest to him. For example, he's sure that his sister isn't lying about her involvement in the murder the Santiago, but someone else seems to have the suspicion that she knew about it all along. Members of his family also seem to be the only people who actively try to help Santiago, which is a little unlikely to us.
On top of everything else, there's one even weirder thing about our narrator. He's the first person narrator, but the text almost reads like it's the third person omniscient—the narrator talks almost as if he is inside the heads of all of the characters and knows everything that's going on. And that would be great, except he obviously doesn't. Or else there wouldn't be a mystery, right?
This feeling of an omniscient narrator probably comes from his journalistic investigation coupled with his pre-existing biases. He knows more than your normal person would know because he's collected a lot of data, and he feels that he knows even more than that because he's biased for and against certain people. So keep that in mind when you're reading through Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Not only are the characters lying to you, but also the narrator might be lying to you about their lies.