Santiago Nasar

Character Analysis

Who is Santiago Nasar? (Besides the Unluckiest Man in the World)

Everything in this novel is about Santiago Nasar. The story is centered on his murder, and he's supposed to be the protagonist, but we hardly know anything about him—well, besides that he's dead.

We know that he's rich, engaged to be married, likes to party, and has a bunch of guns. That's basically it. It kind of makes you wonder why the narrator, who is supposed to be a good friend of his, is so skimpy with the details.

Think about it this way: What's the most important thing about Santiago? Since we don't know anything else about him, it's his death. His death is what defined him as a person, and that's what makes him important to the story. But did it have to be Santiago? We don't think so. Angela could have pointed the finger at anyone else and the story would have still played out the same way, which only serves to make Santiago's death that much more tragic.

Outsider

You probably noticed that the people in the town are kind of prejudiced. We'll dive a bit deeper into this can of worms over in the Setting section, but for now, let's just acknowledge the fact that there are slurs against Jews, homosexuals, and people of Arab descent all over the text. But the one that matters to Santiago is the last one: Arab.

Santiago's father was of Arab descent, and he inherited a lot from him. The narrator says:

He had turned twenty-one the last week in January, and he was slim and pale and had his father's eyelids and curly hair. [...] They spoke Arabic between themselves, but not in front of Plácida Linero, so that she wouldn't feel excluded. (1.8)

Just like Shakira, Santiago is a descendent of Arab people who immigrated to Colombia. That makes him, just like most members of minority communities, an outsider. Even though he was born and raised there, some people still treat him like he doesn't belong.

If it weren't for the murder plot, it probably wouldn't matter that Santiago is half Arab. But when the plot is an action, the town's prejudice shows itself. Many people seem to try and stop Angela's brothers from killing Santiago, but others don't seem too upset that an Arab person is about to be killed. On top of that, after his death, it's assumed that the peaceful community will somehow suddenly become bloodthirsty and violent. Sounds like your typical racism against minorities to us.

So would the murder still have happened if Santiago weren't an Arab person? Probably. But would there have been such little outcry? Maybe not. Being a member of this outsider group makes Santiago an ideal scapegoat for Angela's deflowering.

Guilty as Charged?

Now this is the big question. Is Santiago guilty? Let's just say, we wouldn't be surprised if he was.

There are two big pieces of evidence that attest to Santiago's potential guilt. The first is how he acts with Divina Flor. His dad had taken her mom's virginity, and it looks like Santiago was planning on walking in his footsteps. Divina tells us what Santiago does to her:

"He grabbed my whole pussy," Divina Flor told me. "It was what he always did when he caught me alone in some corner of the house, [...]" (1.21)

So any time he is alone with Divina Flor, he molests her. So is he the sort of guy who's capable of assaulting a woman and taking her virginity? That would be a big fat yes.

The second piece of evidence is not as strong as the first, but we think it's pretty telling. Did you notice that Santiago basically only talks about one person in the whole novel? A person that he has silly nicknames for? More than one time, Santiago talks about Angela Vicario like this:

"She's all set to be hooked," Santiago Nasar would tell me, "your cousin the ninny is." (2.16)

It might not seem like a big deal, but it's a little suspicious to us. He sounds like a kid in elementary school who can't admit that he likes a girl, so instead of being nice to her, he pulls on her pigtails or calls her names.

If it weren't for a few other odd things that seem to happen in the novel, we'd say that this is a case closed. We have no reason to believe that Santiago wouldn't take the virginity of any girl he came across. So it wouldn't be too surprising if Angela were one of those girls.

Innocent?

So here is where the cracks in our ironclad argument appear. There are two big problems with assuming that Santiago is guilty. The first is that no one has ever seen Angela and Santiago together. Heck, no one even sees Angela outside of her house without her mom as a chaperone. So how in the world did she manage to lose her virginity? Much less to a guy like Santiago?

The second problem—It seems like Santiago had absolutely no idea what was going on. He was totally confused. The narrator tells us:

"From the first moment [Nahir Miguel] I understood that he didn't have the slightest idea of what I was saying," he told me. Then he asked him outright if he knew that the Vicario brothers were looking for him to kill him. He turned pale and lost control in such a way that it was impossible to think that he was pretending, he told me. [...] "I don't understand a God-damned thing," Santiago Nasar said. (5.58)

Okay, so why does his confusion prove that he's innocent?

Santiago grew up in this town. He knows just as much as anyone else that a bride who had lost her virginity could be returned to her family. He would also know that her brothers would be obliged to kill whoever took it. So since he seems like a pretty smart guy, Santiago should've been arming himself heavily from the very first day that Angela got engaged. But he never seemed worried about being killed. So could he have done it? In this case, it seems fairly unlikely.

But just like all of the other mysteries in this novel, we don't have enough information to really know the truth. Is Santiago guilty? Maybe. Is he innocent? Maybe. Is he dead? Most definitely.