The Strong Themes Of Love And Death In Literature - Term Paper Example

The Strong Themes Of Love And Death In Literature Perhaps the greatest love story ever written, Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez explores the reality of heartbreak. With beautifully crafted characters taken largely from his own life, Marquez writes of the physical side affects love inflicts upon them. The major themes of love and death are intertwined throughout the novel and characters are defined by their relationship to them. Family is an honored tradition in this small Caribbean port town where parents closely monitor the love interests of their blossoming children and a promise to love someone forever holds true against all odds. Love can infect and hurt these characters as viciously as the outbreak of cholera can dehydrate and kill them. Marquez is a Columbian born winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of numerous acclaimed stories. He was raised by a grandfather who was a Colonial, notorious for his philandering and his adventure storytelling as well as by his grandmother who shared her own stories of ghosts and superstition with him. Two major events in Columbia's history shaped Marquez's life and his writing. The banana strike massacre of 1928 and a period of time referred to as la Violencia that followed. Both killed thousands of innocent people in an already war torn country full of political unrest. It was eventually these life incidents, personalized and coupled with the storytelling voice he inherited from his grandmother that made Marquez the successful writer he is today. The story of his own parents' courtship is the basis for the characters of Florentino and Fermina in the novel.1 The two recurrent themes in Love in Time of Cholera are love and death. They are often intertwined and it appears the affliction of one of these means the character is actually suffering from both. The first example of this blurring is the suicide of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour in the first chapter of the novel. He kills himself with the vapors of gold cyanide and the young medical intern who arrives with the police inspector is eager to study the corpses heart. “among the countless suicides [Dr. Urbino] could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love.”2 Dr. Urbino, leaves the scene of the suicide and discovers his best friend and chess partner's secret, “illicit love.”3 This “haughty mulatta with cruel golden eyes” beat him at his final game of chess and then helped him to kill himself. “I could not [report his attempt at suicide],” she told Dr. Urbino, “I loved him too much.”4 This confusion of love and death continues throughout the novel. The main love story in Love in the Time of Cholera is between Florentino Arizo and Fermina Daza. Florentino used to watch the young Fermina walking to and from school. The aspiring poet he was, he wrote a more than sixty page love letter to her but, at his mother's advice, did not deliver it. He instead stalked and stared at the school girl, once even appearing in her bedroom in the dead of night. The letter he finally delivers consists only of words promising his “his perfect fidelity and his everlasting love.”5 He, of course, means it beyond all imaginable realms. Their childish letter-writing affair and few brief encounters dissolves “with a wave of her hand...” Today when I saw you,” Fermina writes to Florentino, “I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.”6 This rejection, this heartbreak, makes Florentino becomes physically ill. He eventually turns to a life of nymphomania for consolation. However, the depth of his love, the trueness of his vow, makes the symptoms he suffers from the heartbreak almost deadly. [Florentino's] anguish was complicated by diarrhea and green vomit, he became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells, and his mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera... he had a weak pulse, the hoarse breathing, and the perspiration of a dying man. But his examinations revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.7 Florentino waits “fifty-one years and nine months and four days”8 to repeat his oath of true love to Fermina on the day her husband, Dr. Urbino dies. 'Fermina,'” he says, “'I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.'”9 Fermina is shocked and still grief-stricken at the loss of her husband. She had had a loving relationship with Dr. Urbino and the only thing they had disagreed on in fifty years is whether or not there was a bar of soap in the shower on one occasion. However, Dr. Urbino was practical and their love was sturdy. He was a man who believed that matrimony is “an absurd invention that could exist only by the infinite grace of God” and “that the problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”10 This is not all like the passion Florentino feels for his beloved Fermina even after more than half a century. After hearing this vow she weeps unconsolably and “prayed to God to send her death that night while she slept.”11 The idea that someone could love her so completely makes her wish for death. The relationship she had had with her husband was kind and giving, but it lacked the desperation and emotion that Florentino ignites in her. Love and death are again confused. When Fermina finally realizes she misses the romantic Florentino is, she agrees to go on a riverboat cruise with him. There they make love, despite the fact that she thinks she smells “like an old woman.”12 When the reality of their future together becomes unimaginable, the captain of the boat is convinced to raise a yellow flag announcing an outbreak of Cholera onboard so they will be shunned at all ports. The now elderly couple resigns to their chosen life of eternal love. “Florentino... looked [at] the clear horizon, the December sky without a single cloud, the waters that could be navigated forever.... it is life, more than death, that has no limits.”13 Since their love story is complete they have nothing else to live for, except, essentially, suicide as they float away into the sunset. In the largely fictional, port town where Love in the Time of Cholera is set, family is very important. The novel shows how strong a parents influence can be in the life of their child, and also, how no influence is strong enough to extinguish true love. Three years into the letter writing, love affair between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, her father discovers their secret when a nun calls him from her school. Lorenzo Daza immediately sends away the aunt that had raised Fermina for her assumed betrayal to his parenting and tries to reason with his fifteen-year-old daughter. In the face of losing her true love (as only a teenager can understand it) Fermina “put the meat knife to her throat, without dramatics but with a steady hand and eyes so aghast that he did not dare to challenge her.”14 Lorenzo next tries to reason with the young suitor, but finds himself flustered and threatens the young man. “Shoot me,” is Florentino's steady answer. “There is no greater glory than to die for love.”15 The strong, Latin American father that Lorenzo is, his last course of action is to immediately take Fermina away on a trip for a year and a half to make her forget her lover. This wealthy father has an extremely powerful demeanor, and his need to control his only daughter and choose her husband for her are overwhelming. She does in fact marry the prominent Dr. Urbino at her father's suggestion and settle into a comfortable life in the style she is accustomed to. By contrast, Florentino is raised by his loving mother, a freed quadroon who runs a small notion shop and had her only son out of wedlock. When she learns of her son's love interest she encourages him and when he suffers from cholera-like heartbreak she tells him to “enjoy his martyrdom... because these things don't last your whole life.”16 Transito Ariza can see the beauty in love, even when it is hurting her son, but she never imagined that this love affair would last more than fifty years and end blissfully on a riverboat. She helps her son to make a name for himself in the world and do whatever makes him happy, be it reading poetry or proposing to a girl a class above him. She does not try to control this young man but lets him find his own path in the world. Latin America often allows for unfair biases in the raising of children as is seen in Love in the Time of Cholera. Men are allowed to sleep around, get dirty, and make mistakes, as long as they grow up strong. Women, on the other hand, are taught to be obedient to their father's and then to the men chosen for them. One study on Latin America and the Caribbean says, “subordination of women has been ideologically conceived as an integral part of the natural order of things...”17 Marquez shows in the backstory of Florentino and Fermina that this is true in his fictional Caribbean town as well, but that a love this strong can easily overcome even the strictest of parental rulings. Gabriel Garcia Marquez weaves a magical tale of love in his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. He explores love in the young and the old, the practical and the whimsical, the rich and the poor. His characters are complicated, sensitive and honorable. Marquez tells stories that are familiar to him, drawing from his rich childhood to fashion his characters. As each of them in turn finds true love, so are they graced with death. The love that exists in this novel comes with strong, tangible symptoms. Love can elate and satiate these characters, making them feel ready for death. Love can also torture and torment them, making them wish for an end to their lives. The heartbreak associated with the loss of love is as devastating as the threat of cholera in this small town during a time of epidemics. The strong themes of love and death engulf and support each character through the trials of their life. The importance of family, as well as the obvious differences in raising children of different genders plays a large part in the development of this love story. Cholera is ever present and, like love, if it doesn't kill you, it can only make you stronger. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bose, Christine E., and Acosta-Belén, Edna. Women in the Latin American Development Process. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995. Ruch, Allen. The Modern Word. Internet. Available from http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_biography.html. Accessed 9 December 2010. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988. Seas, Gotuzzo. “Cholera.” Google Health. Internet. Available from https://health.google.com/health/ref/Cholera. Accessed 9 December 2010. Read More