"Love in the Time of Cholera"

Paper Summary:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "Love in the Time of Cholera" is, on one level, the inspiring story of a love that lasted over fifty years and was consummated only when the two people (Fermina Daza and her devoted Florentino Ariza) reached old age. The paper shows that this is an involving story that keeps the reader attentive to the fortunes of the principal characters and entertained by the many digressions the author makes along the way. It shows, however, that the very title of the book hints that there is something more to the story. In the contrast between "love" and the plague of cholera it may seem that this is a story of the triumph of humanity's great achievement--romantic love--over the forces of nature that work against human happiness and well-being.

From the Paper:

"The novel is set, roughly, in the period from the late 1870s to the 1930s in an unnamed city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. In the course of the novel's time-span the impact of the presence of human beings on each other and on the land they occupy is a major focus of the novel. In the figures of Juvenal Urbino and Florentino Ariza there is a contrast between the man who is a part of the city and the man who works at the edges of humanity's attempt to bring the world under control. What they share, however, is an indifference to their surroundings, except as they serve their own immediate interests. Urbino and the city represent the empty conventionality and Europe-directed thinking of the remnants of exploitative colonial society, while Ariza, at the jungle outpost of the River Company, represents the equally exploitative modern mania for technological advances and the relentless expansion of commerce."

More papers on "Love in the Time of Cholera":

• Analytical Essay # 9788 : "Love in the Time of Cholera"
• Analytical Essay # 10110 : "Analysis of "Love in the Time of Cholera"
• Analytical Essay # 51017 : "Love in the Time of Cholera" and Theme of Love"

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