Ibrahim+Nasar+--+Sehoon+Joo


 * **Character's Name:** || Ibrahim Nasar ||
 * **Role in Novel:** || Ibrahim Nasar is Santiago Nasar's father and he arrived in this town with the "last Arabs at the end of the civil wars" (11). Interestingly, he is never a living character in the novel, but described in detail to provide information about Santiago's past and the many similarities between Ibrahim and Santiago help explain what kind of a character Santiago is.

Like most father and son relationships, Santiago learned much from Ibrahim. Ibrahim gave Santiago the habit of sleeping with an unloaded gun under his pillow. Ibrahim taught Santiago "at a very early age the manipulation of firearms, love for horses and mastery of high-flying birds of prey" (7). Not only this, Ibrahim is accredited to teaching Santiago "the good arts of valor and prudence" (7). Santiago is not seen in a critical way by many characters (with the exception of Victoria Guzman) and this is probably because Ibrahim taught him all these different skills.

Ibrahim passed on his physical traits such as "Arab eyelids and curly hair" (7) to his son and a combination of these outward traits and the skills he taught Santiago make these two characters extremely similar. Even the way Santiago approaches Victoria Guzman's daughter, Divina Flor, seem like a parallel to Ibrahim's coaxing of Victoria many years ago. Also, Ibrahim is portrayed in the beginning of the novel as fairly calculating. He buys a house and makes many different plans to change it, being so meticulous as to make the rear door "taller so that a horse could enter through it" (11). Although this attention to detail largely seems like a trait unique to Ibrahim, this calculating personality has passed on to his son. The night before he was murdered, Santiago spent time "calculating the expense of the wedding" and made such accurate measurements as to say that the decorations must have cost "fourteen first-class funerals" (42). Marquez never shows Ibrahim as a living character and he is not mentioned except for the first few pages of the novel. However, the numerous similarities and traits that he has passed on to Santiago makes Ibrahim an important character and a "tool" to help describe Santiago. || There is no way of verifying whether or not Marquez chose to name Santiago's father Ibrahim to give further insight into the character due to the limited information we know about the man, but the similarities between the more famous Ibrahim in the Qur'an and the Ibrahim in this novel is worth noting.
 * **Significance of Name:** || Considering how Ibrahim is of Arabic descent, it is important to observe what significance his name carries in the Arabic culture. In the Arabic world, Ibrahim is a popular name and is also a name of a prophet that appears in the Qur'an. Ibrahim in the religious text is portrayed as an upright man who was neither a polytheist nor a Christian or a Jew. Irahim also had two sons and had close relations with them and loved them dearly. The basic description of the religious man portrayed in the Qur'an seems to be similar to the Ibrahim in __The Chronicle of a Death Foretold__. Other than Ibrahim's one known affair with Victoria, like the Ibrahim in the Qur'an, he was friendly with his son and no other major character flaws are mentioned about him. The affair might be damaging to the honest, upright image of the man that I am trying to establish, but we must keep in mind that affairs were extremely common in those days.

Ibrahim Nasar's first name is definitely of Arabic origin and as one can easily assume, so is his last name. Unlike his first name, his last name appears to hold no significance in history or other texts. ||
 * **Student Name:** || Sehoon Joo ||