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Cholera is Lovesickness, But Not Really
"He'd lapped at her ankles like a lovesick pup, and she'd been exactly what she was now, a woman born too beautiful and too rich to worry about a small thing." - Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a timeless love story set in the late 19th and early 20th century about passion, obsession, social barriers, and paradoxical fidelity and infidelity relationships. But as Susan Elizabeth Phillips' quote suggests, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel poignantly depicts love more than just a strong feeling of affection that the main characters had for each other, but as a disease. Garcia Marquez does a masterful job throughout the novel in creating a story about love that engulfs readers, and yet blows the audiences away with the innumerable literary devices in Love in the Time of Cholera: to convey many hidden meanings of love. But most importantly Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses metaphor with cholera as love.
edited image of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, signing in...
19/03/2009 La Ministra de Cultuta de Colombia Paul...
Image of Gabriel Garcia Marquez signatureCholera, a bodily disease that impairs its victims with imaginable effects such as dehydration and diarrhea, is a metaphor that will unfold as a theme of love as a plague that affects its sufferers tirelessly emotionally and physically just as cholera. Gabriel Marquez literally focuses on lovesickness. For one does not generally associate passion and love with diarrhea, dehydration, or a painful death, which is why cholera was used as a tool to illustrate lovesickness in this novel.
Florentino Ariza, perhaps the most dynamic protagonist, is a "sick" obsessive sex addict that falls in love at first sight with the haughty Fermina Daza. Florentino is sick with cholera. However, cholera to Florentino Ariza is more than a sickness, but a paradox used by Gabriel...