<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)