<3 in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is an amazingly well-written novel that explains the many facets and elements of love. Love is an important issue that exists in everyday human life, and Marquez is really able to capture the emotions of love through beautiful writing. Marquez uses his characters to also show how love can exist in different forms, by showing the different relationships that exist through the characters such as Florentino Ariza, Dr. Urbino, and Fermina Daza.
Marquez really is able to evoke strong emotions in the reader through his vivid descriptions and passages of love. The words that Marquez use do not simply convey that a character feels “love” for another character, but the reader understands how deeply a character feels for another or how love appears in a dependent way. To show what I mean, I will use an example from the novel that exhibit the beauty and strength of Marquez’s writing. The love between Dr. Urbino and his wife to me seems to be consisting of love that must exist in a long relationship. The love between Dr. Urbino and his Fermina seems a result of a long marriage and dependency, not true and passionate love, but love none the less. Marquez writes, “She wept for the death of her husband, for her solitude and rage, and when she went into the empty bedroom she wept for herself because she had rarely slept alone in that bed since the loss of her virginity. Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: “The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die””…(50). Marquez beautifully enables the reader to understand that Fermina felt almost as another part of Dr. Urbino after so many years of marriage. The words “alone,” “absence,” and “empty” capture Fermina’s loss and feeling of loneliness after losing “part” of her. Through this passage we also are able to see that the love of Fermina and Urbino is hinged upon the fact that they have been married for so long and are dependent on each other’s companionship and presence, nothing more.
Marquez’s writing in relation to the love between Fermina and Ariza shows a different aspect of love in the novel. When Ariza writes a novel of his own, almost, of a love letter to Fermina containing pages of compliments expressing his love, the readers see that he is definitely obsessed with Fermina. The fact that Ariza is able to write about seventy pages on Fermina shows how much he feels for her and how much he desires her. Instead of Marquez writing that Ariza was simply infatuated with her, we are able to see the extent of his love for Fermina. Fermina and Ariza’s love is different than that of Fermina and Dr. Urbino’s love, due to the fact that a more romantic love exists. Though initially, the love is mostly one sided, due to Ariza’s obsession, Fermina eventually returns the love towards Ariza. Fermina and Ariza both fall romantically, or as romantic as they can get in their culture, in love and truly begin to desire each other. This love between Ariza and Fermina is a foil to that of Urbino and Fermina’s, due to the fact that the Ariza and Fermina love is not hinged upon the fact of dependency but of a mutual desire of each other. Marquez’s writing deeply strengthens the love that Ariza feels and puts heartfelt emotion behind the words. I don’t know, but I would find it extremely hard to write even twenty pages on someone I loved. To write seventy pages for Fermina, Ariza must love Fermina one heck of a lot. (646)

The Sound and the Fury

There were many things in the Quentin section that grabbed my attention when I read June 2 of The Sound and the Fury. For this blog posting I want to discuss two things that especially caught my attention in the Quentin section: time and the eerie girl that follows Quentin. The Quentin section, though narrated from the view of a fully grown, fully developed man, to me is actually harder to understand than the Benjy section. But, one of the most rewarding experiences of reading the Quentin section is being able to connect it to the previous section and also seeing the foreshadowing that lies within its pages. I found that I really liked Quentin more than any other character in The Sound and the Fury; it’s a pity he had to drown himself. I really respect what he stands for, what he fights for, and I respect what Quentin went through.

From the beginning of the Quentin section, time presents itself as an important issue that must be faced by Quentin. When Quentin first wakes up he notices that the “shadow of the sash appeared on the curtain,” indicating that it was “between seven and eight oclock”. Then, Quentin immediately hears the ticking of Grandfather’s watch that Father gave to him. It becomes immediately clear that time is one of Quentin’s chief concerns at this time, the beginning of the novel. Time is an issue that gnaws away at Quentin constantly. When Quentin is on the way to the repair shop he notices the “clock, high up in the sun…” and the “watch ticking away” in his pocket. Quentin then becomes acutely aware of the ticking of clocks in the repair shop and asks if any of the clocks show the correct time. Further along the Quentin section, Quentin asks others if there is a clock that chimes nearby and refers to the time frequently. It becomes clear that Quentin is trying to stop time and at times it seems he is running away from time. But why is Quentin running away from time? I believe that Quentin wants to run away from time because he can not face the breaking of his idealistic vision of him and Caddy together and pure. Father tries to convince Quentin that time will heal his pain at his broken vision, but Quentin believes that it is a wound that can not be healed. I believe that Quentin believes he has no other choice than taking away his life, because he believes he has nothing to live for. I also believe that Quentin inside really does not want to commit suicide, seen by his hesitancy to commit the act. Quentin avoids time to show that his pain is everlasting and can not be erased by time and he avoids time to stall his death. Quentin pointlessly realizes he must brush his teeth, brush his clothes off, and comb his hair before he must kill himself, but really all he wants is more time to live.

In class, we talked deeply and heavily about the mysterious girl with “black eyes”. When I read this passage I immediately thought of parallels of this girl in Quentin’s scene, but I was too afraid to bring my ideas up in class, for fear of them not being taken seriously. So I decided to blog my ideas. I believe that the girl, or the mysterious child, is a writer’s convention to signify imminent trouble or even death. In movies recently, mysterious children are used in a similar fashion to that of the girl in The Sound and the Fury. In Stephen Jackson’s King Kong and in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto little girls are symbols of imminent death. As soon as I read the first encounter of the “ragged girl” with “black eyes” I thought of these characters from the movies. Here are some pictures to show you what parallels I drew: (pictures at top)



Mysterious Native Girl from King Kong: before a battle

The other girl is from Apocalypto and she foreshadows the rise fall of the Mayan Empire.