Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?
Journalistic, Dreamlike, Humorous
It probably wouldn't surprise you to hear that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a journalist for several years before becoming a Nobel Prize winning author. While you might not see a lot of that journalistic influence in the majority of his work, it's up front and center in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
If you didn't get that through all of the narrators snooping around and questioning people for evidence, you probably felt it in freezers full of legal terms. For example:
The lawyer stood by the thesis of homicide in legitimate defense of honor, 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. (3.1)
In other words, the twins were not guilty of murder because they were defending their honor.
But don't be fooled by the narrator's journalistic tone—this kind of tone is normally reserved for newspapers, where you assume that the information you're reading is objective and factual. But the text of this novel is anything but that. Nothing is certain, everything is subjective, and we're pretty sure there are no facts in the text except for Santiago's death. So don't be tricked by this authoritative tone.
The dreamlike and humorous tone that Marquez sometimes uses is way more representative of what's actually going on in this novel. It starts from the very first line:
He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird s***. (1.1)
We begin the novel in a dream, not sure what's going on or what is real. But even in that dream, right at the very end, we are jolted out of our reverie by some pretty basic potty humor. It's okay if you laughed. We did too.
This dreamlike tone is basically representative of how confusing the actual events of Santiago's murder really are. Even though the narrator attempts to straighten things out in a journalistic way, everything happens as if the whole town is in a dream. You think someone is in one place, but then they are suddenly somewhere else. A door that is normally closed is suddenly open. We're just surprised that there wasn't a scene where Santiago was naked in front of his classroom—we've all had that dream.
In a way, this dichotomy of tone in the novel illustrates the entire conflict of the story. While the narrator is trying to put things into his neat, serious, little, analytical box, the story is not cooperating. It breaks the box down with its wild, humorous, and dreamlike nature. Just like Miley Cyrus, this mystery can't be tamed.