Love in the Time of Cholera may be seen as the product of a more experienced author, who no longer

needs the resources of Magical realism and ambiguity to surprise the reader. Modernity and Marginality
were the dazzling and multipart prose of Garcia Marquez, which has still not been sufficiently analyzed
for its ideological propositions. 1This great, poetic love story explores the fatal impact of materialism on
our vulnerable hearts.Love in the time of Choera is set in a Caribbean city Cartagena de Indias, between
the 1870s and the early 1930s. The novel is about love and sex, marriage and freedom, youth and old
age. The novel is based on a sexual triangle: the upper-class doctor Juvenal Urbino, the unglamorous
shipping clerk Florentino Ariza, and the beautiful parvenue Fermina Daza. Juvenal is based on a
distinguished local physician, Henrique de la Vega, who was Garcia Marquez‘s family doctor; Florentino,
the main character; and Fermina, an astonishing mixture of Mercedes, the ghost of Tachia, and 1the
external details of Luisa Santiaga at the time of her youth and courtship. 1The novel is organized in six
parts. The first and last parts are devoted to old age. Part two and three are devoted to youth. Parts four
and five are devoted to middle age. The sixth part divided into three chapters. The novel implicitly states
the four great reconciliations that Garcia Marquez himself had effected as he approached old age: with
France, Paris, Tachia, Cartagena and above all with his father. Love in the time of cholera is an elegy of
love that mask its own genetics, a love story that has love as its prophylactic, a fable whose safeguard or
phylactery, is writing. It is melancholy writing as a breaching iconoclasim tracing the love‘s vacuity in the
pertinacious loyalties of an unloving marriage, masked by youthful urbaneness and firm constancy1.
Time is the one of the major theme in the novel. It is the continuous part of our lives; it is not the matter
what we do and where we go. Time is there as our constant companion. The progression of time
generally brings change and progress and creates a distinction between the traditional – the old ways –
and the modern – the new ways. Although, we use these labels to separate and categorize people,
ideas, and events, the two terms are actually connected and constantly pulling in opposite directions.
1Love in the Time of Cholera takes place at the turn of the twentieth century1. Very early in the book,
we learn that the love between Florentino and Fermina does not flow smoothly because Fermina
chooses wealth and security with Juvenal Urbino over the passion offered her by Florentino. In reaction
to his loss, Florentino spends his life in pursuit of wealth and fleeting sexual encounters. In the story the
two main characters Florentino and Urbino has different representation. Raymond Leslie Williams, an
expert in Latin American literature, describes Florentino as ―a man who never embraces anything
associated with modernity‖ and ―an anachronism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries‖
(108). Florentino is not a typical man in many respects. 1Florentino‘s 1tendency toward the traditional is
evident in his obsession with Fermina as well. For fifty-one years, Florentino clings to his love for
Fermina; despite the many women he encounters, in his heart Florentino refuses to allow anyone to
replace Fermina as his true love. His passion for Fermina acts as the focal point of his life, stopping time
and progress until the moment he is once again able to court her. The magnitude of his love is so strong
that it keeps him in Cartagena. He has the opportunity to work elsewhere withthe telegraph company,
but he decides to return to Cartagena to stay close to Fermina even though she has already married Dr.
Urbino. In all ways, Florentino resists modernity as a cat resists water and instead opts to live in his
traditional ways. 1If Florentino is representative of the force of tradition, then Dr. Juvenal Urbino is the
epitome of modernity. Urbino embraces and advocates progress. Unlike Florentino‘s compulsion to stay
in Cartagena, Urbino travels to Europe to complete his medical studies and find his direction. Urbino
becomes an important and influential figure in Cartagena and offers a vision for starting the city on a
path of modernization. 2Urbino‘s childhood is spent amidst the colonial grandeur of wealth and
affluence; however, upon his return from medical school in Paris, Urbino is dismayed to see how far his
beloved city has slid during his absence. Urbino‘s drive toward modernity is thus ignited in part because
the traditional city of his youth no longer exists in reality. With nothing left but exquisite memories, the
only direction left for Urbino to go is forward. Urbino embraces this progressive attitude and leads
Cartagena into the modern era by initiating reforms such as better sanitation measures. These strides
toward modernization demonstrate Urbino‘s determination to reach a state of modernity, a place he
views as the golden jewel of existence. 2The traditional attitude of Florentino and the modern attitude
of Urbino are manifest in their reactions to and involvement with the cholera epidemic. Both men are
impacted by cholera. When Florentino falls madly in love, his symptoms match those of cholera;
however, Florentino resigns himself to ride out the symptoms and refuses to seek relief or consolation in
modern treatments. Cholera reappears in Florentino‘s life at the end of the novel during his riverboat
cruise with Fermina. The captain of the riverboat flies the cholera flag to deter other ships from making
contact, leaving Florentino and Fermina free to live out their love together. 2 While Florentino‘s
experiences with cholera echo of a traditional path, Urbino‘s experiences with cholera scream of a
modern approach. Urbino‘s life mission is to eradicate cholera as vindication for his father‘s death, and
he makes the fulfillment of his mission the focal point of his life. This continual push toward progress is
characteristic of Urbino‘s modern outlook. Not content to continue using old treatments and theories,
Urbino practices modern techniques; his sights are always on the future and his anticipated success of
eliminating cholera.

2On the other hand for Florentino choosing a riverboat to fulfill his fantasy instead of a more modern
form of transportation such as a hot air balloon or automobile signifies the triumph of tradition in
Florentino‘s life, for his adherence to his values and traditional ways has finally helped him succeed in
regaining Fermina‘s love. Florentino‘s experiences with cholera echo of a traditional path2. Urbino and
Florentino has different experience on meeting with the love of their life. Urbino earns recognition as
the best doctor around; however, like the modernization he pursues, Urbino leaves the traditional
elements of his life behind in favor of modernity. One of the most blatant examples of Urbino‘s values is
his relationship with Fermina. Urbino meets Fermina when he makes a house call to examine her for
cholera, but he does not feel the traditional pang of love when meeting his future wife.2 Urbino‘s
apparent indifference to Fermina matches his indifference to tradition, for Urbino‘s interest lies in the
modern world and the future. Florentino and Urbino are powerful representatives of tradition and
modernity against the backdrop of a country beginning to modernize yet struggling against cholera, an
old foe. Both men are affected at some level by tradition and modernity, but each character
demonstrates a tendency toward one or the other. Whether moving forward or staying back, Dr. Urbino
and Florentino are swept up into time‘s eternal march onward and the enduring conflict of tradition and
modernity.2These love story between Urbino and Fermina is way more different than Florentino and
Fermina's love story. Fermina and Florentino‘s love story can be clearly seen in two parts. The first is
when Florentino ingeniously, but unsuccessfully, tries to conquer Fermina‘s love. Although he is not
experienced, he manages to win her attention and innocent teenage love until she comes to realize that
she does not love him. The second part takes place at the end of their lives.She is now seventy-two
years old and he is seventy-seven. He persists inhis love for her, and Fermina, although still firm and
strong in character, accepts him. Love in an unconventional way is the central theme in the novel. Love
allows the representation and the confrontation of two different cultures orders which are revealed
through taste, values, language, and attitudes. When Dr. Urbino diesmtrying to save his parrot
Florentino comes 3and professes his love to Fermina Daza3 though on the other hand is enraged at
first, she gradually begins a friendship with him that rekindles their love, and they consummate this
relationship on a riverboat trip at the end of the novel.3 The Love of Florentino Ariza for Fermina Daza is
finally consummated after fifty years, nine months and four days, when they are both over seventy years
old. Fermina Daza is Florentino‘s ideal of perfection. He sees her once, when she is thirteen and he is
eighteen; a single glance, and he falls in love for the rest of his life. He courts her for two years with
forbidden letters until Fermina agrees to marry him. When they are forced apart, the distraught
Florentino waits fifty years for her 3husband, Dr. Urbino, to die, meanwhile, having over six hundred
sexual encounters and recording them in several volumes. This love story is fantastic, humorous, and
serious at the same time. Florentino keeps trying to live out the romances he has read. He is an expert
at love letters, like Cyrano de Bergerac, writing them for other lovers as well as him. The author, Garcia
Marquez returns over and over to the central idea that it is Love that rules life rather than order and
authority. With Gabriel Garcia, Marquez‘s Novel Love in the time of Cholera readers around the world
are reminded that love is ageless. 3His belief in love and romance is very different on others as he
openly express it through his writings. As mojority sees love as a special feeling, Gabriel Garcia describes
it through the Novel Love in the time of Cholera as a dominant thing that overpower any forms of
authority. Garcia Marquez shows that love is a rebellion or disruption of society‘s rules, yet it seems that
almost everyone in every class of society is found engaged in both sanctified and illicit love affairs, even
the straight-laced Dr. Urbino. Love gives life its juice and meaning. The author celebrates all sorts of
love, without privileging any particular kind. He calls the brothel, ―a museum of love,‖ where the clients
leave behind their belongings (II. 78). Married love has its own special flavor. Although Fermina has been
unhappy in her marriage, she wishes that as her husband dies, he would know how much she had loved
him. She wishes they could start over again and say what has been left unsaid. For the aging Florentino
and Urbino, the illicit love affair is a way to defeat boredom and midlife crisis. Death, decay and aging
are the other themes chipped away at the romanticism and sentimentality of the book, for it is also a
meditation on old age, death, and human memory. The theme of old age adds the temporal elements
that not carries the representation possibilities to the extreme but also converts conflicts into processes
and stages into cycles. When Dr. Juvenal Urbino finds his friend de Saint-Amour has committed suicide
at the age of sixty, he attributes it to ―Gerontophobia,‖ (I. 37) the fear of old age. He understands this
well for at eighty-one, he cannot dress himself without his wife‘s help and is losing his memory. The
reader witnesses the aging process of the characters, seeing them first as young vibrant people, and
finally in their decay. A humorous passage describes Florentino‘s fight against baldness, and Fermina
warns Florentino off when he approaches her for a kiss in their seventies, saying that she has the sour
smell of an old woman. The city is also in decay. It is a stagnant tropical port at the turn of the century,
with its crumbling old monuments that look back to colonial times. The constant image of death gives
the narrative an apocalyptic tone underneath the romance. There is death from cholera, death from
war, death from old age, suicide, and revenge.3Death is tragic, and it is absurd, illustrated by the black
humor of Dr. Juvenal Urbino‘s death from climbing a ladder to catch his favorite parrot and3 falling.
Urbino dies without the benefit of the last rites and in ―terror of not finding God in the darkness of
death‖ (I. 41)4. The novel can be understood with regard to Cynicism. Fermina Daza defies her father,
the convent school, and social expectations by receiving the courtship of Florentino Ariza, her social
inferior. Succumbing to his romantic letters and the charm of his storytelling about their love, she is
ready to give up everything. She herself becomes the main obstacle to this romance when she suddenly
sees him in public, looking very ugly and plain: ―she felt the abyss of disenchantment‖ (II. 102).
Disillusioned with Florentino, she finally gives in to the handsome aristocratic Dr. Urbino, though he is
much less interesting. Other disillusionments are scattered throughout the narrative, showing that life
never quite meets one‘s expectations. Florentino Ariza‘s gullibility is illustrated when he believes he has
located the spot where a Spanish galleon was sunk in the Caribbean just off the Colombian coast with
gold a treasure. Ariza employs Euclides, a twelve-year-old boy, to dive for the treasure. The boy
apparently finds the ship and begins to return with bits of jewelry supposedly from the wreck. Ariza is
about to finance a major operation when his mother sees that the jewelry is fake and that Ariza has
been duped by the boy. He believed the treasure would give him the means to marry Fermina4. The
novel thus warns against naivety. For instance, it is only after Saint-Amour‘s death that Dr. Urbino
discovers from his final letter that his friend was not a pure man. He pretended to be a refugee, but he
has escaped prison for murder and cannibalism. Urbino tells his wife what he hates most is that his
friend deceived him, yet he does the same to his own wife. Fermina Daza is disillusioned in her marriage;
first, by never becoming who she dreamed of being when young. Secondly, she goes through a major
period of disillusionment when she discovers her husband‘s affair with Barbara Lynch. She escapes to
the town of her mother‘s family to find the comfort she felt there in childhood, but the town was
decayed, and she is disillusioned once more, because she cannot even hold on to nostalgia. When she
returns to her husband two years later, there is no light in her eyes, and she is an old woman with sharp
temper. Paradoxically, fidelity is paired with in fidelity as part of human nature. Florentino is faithful to
Fermina in a strange way, by having hundreds of affairs while waiting for her, but never losing his focus
on her as his one true love. After the funeral of her husband, he approaches her too soon, telling her
once again of his ―vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love‖ (I. 50). Once in the half century of
waiting for her, he happens to see Fermina‘s reflection in a restaurant mirror, and he persuades the
proprietor to sell him the mirror so that he can take it home 4with him to keep the memory of her
image there. Florentino also notes many ways that his own lovers are faithful to him, not sexually, but
affectionately. For instance, the widow Prudencia Pitre wanted to marry him for years, but keeps it to
herself. Her door is always open to Florentino, even when he shows up at 3:00 a.m. His assistant, Leona,
loves Florentino but shows it, not through lovemaking, but by secretly running his company for him and
giving him the credit. It is her support that makes him into a successful executive of the River Company
of the Caribbean.4 Love and cholera are humorously associated in the book, giving love a life-and-death
aspect. When Florentino Ariza is first courting Fermina Daza, he becomes ill, and his mother is worried.
He has the sign of diarrhea, green vomit, weak and disorientation. 4For Dr. Urbino, cholera symbolizes
the weakness of his society that can only be remedied by science. 4Upon the Doctor's accidental death,
Florentino, now elderly, abruptly ends his affair with fourteen-year-old America Vicuña and, at Dr.
Urbino's wake, professes his "Eternal Fidelity and Everlasting Love" to Fermina. After having banished
him from her home in anger, she sends him a hateful letter. He responds with a meditation on life and
love, which helps her overcome her grief. Gradually, after a letter correspondence, they rekindle their
relationship and spend afternoons together in Fermina's ho me. Florentino asks Fermina to accompany
him on a river voyage, and she accepts. On the voyage, Florentino and Fermina finally make love. As the
ship reaches its last port, Fermina sees people she knows and frets that if they see her with Florentino, it
will cause scandal. Florentino orders the Captain to raise the yellow flag of cholera, which he does.
There remain no passengers on aboard but Fermina, Florentino, the Captain, and his lover. No port will
allow them to dock because of the supposed cholera outbreak aboard, and they are forever exiled to
cruise the river. The novel on the whole becomes a curious mixture of the bland and the banal with the
realistic and the profound. It explores the most familiar clichés involved in letter to agony columns and
the desperate truisms usually proffered in reply. The physical lovemaking of the two elderly lovers,
Fermina and Florentino, is described at the end of the book, in both touching and anti-5romantic detail.
It seems a lot like true love, full of peace and acceptance:―It was as if they had leapt over the arduous
Calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love‖ (VI. 345.) With this affirmation the novel
ends: ―it is life, more than death, than has no limits‖ (348).