garcia marquez love in the time of cholera

Florentino's flowery sentiments often are too overly sentimental to seem serious, Fermina's hardness and pride seem to impede her from feeling real love yet, after more than fifty years, they finally find each other as they should, and they find complete peace in their love. Marquez breaks with convention in presenting the love between Florentino and Fermina, two almost-octogenarians, as the final and most powerful love, the love that seems to have a chance at eternity. The novel is filled with many different loves-between Florentino and Fermina, Fermina and Urbino, Florentino and all of his lovers, Urbino and Barbara Lynch, Hildebranda and her married man, and so on.

Love, as evidenced by the novel's title, is another of the most important themes in Love in the Time of Cholera. A linear chronology does more to identify causes and effects, while a non-linear chronology can stress the resonances of recurring themes in multiple times. The very chronology-or lack of it-in the story fits into this theme, for the interconnectedness of stories always seems more important than a mere chronology, which leads the reader to be as surprised as the characters in the sudden realization of how much time has passed.

The narrator and characters frequently describe their city as behind, 'unchanging on the edge of time.' We see, however, that this is not true-the city is always changing, but its seeming stillness reflects the relativity of time in the story. Fermina and Juvenal ride with the first airmail in a hot air balloon, and later a plane crashes into a town nearby.

We see the river that Florentino travels twice change from lush jungle, overrun by animals and plants, to bare sand, with no wildlife, eroding quickly. The three main protagonists' obsessions with aging and with death also fit with this theme, in that we see both the different ways time affects people physically, and the different ways they deal with it mentally. Marquez shows us Juvenal Urbino's mental decline, Florentino Ariza's loss of hair and teeth, and Fermina Daza's acquisition of the smell of decay. The story spans half a century, and in that period we see the effects of time on people and their relationships-especially love-and its effects on places and cultures. Time is one of the most important themes in Love in the Time of Cholera, and it is closely entwined with almost all of the major themes.

Garcia marquez love in the time of cholera