Keilah Jackson
Professor Ellen Bluestone
Literature 652
23 Feb 2014 Love in the Time of Cholera: A Magical Degenerated Love Story
Love stories are usually filled with romanticism, unrequited love, as well as many scenes of forbidden loves resulting in lovers uniting. Gabriel Marquez took a different route within the novel Love in the Time of Cholera. The novel served readers a detested view of love as well as a supernatural view of human life by using degeneration and magical realism. Magical realism occurs throughout the novel giving readers an ‘out-of-this-world’ experience that exists within a normal setting. An example of this would be Marquez’s use of time within the novel. Time seems to change often by going between the present and the past within same time frames. "At the age of twenty-eight, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been the most desirable of bachelors. He had returned from a long stay in Paris where he had completed advanced studies in medicine and surgery, and from the time he set foot on solid ground he gave overwhelming indications that he had not wasted a minute of his time.”(pg. 105) Within that passage, readers are placed in present moment experiencing Urbino’s return from Paris as though he is in a reminiscent state.
However only a few lines down readers are placed elsewhere. “In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a causal sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April.” (pgs. 105-106) Readers have now witnessed time travel back into Paris. Only a few days later readers are placed further within the past where Urbino is in Paris and he received a telegram during supper with his friends. (p. 105-113)
This play on time is frequent within the novel, giving readers a literal time travel experience that can be both daunting and confusing as well as entertaining and engaging. Marquez heavily ways in on the degeneration of the human body, human life, at the mere thought of love. More so readers gather the mere concept of being loved or in love creates torture and agony on the human body. Be it aging, illness, or more so death, it has been presented that love is a fatal ailment that everyone within the novel suffers from. An example of a result of torture to the body because of love (emotions) would be found within the following passage. “But when he began to wait for an answer to his first letter, his 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 to turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera. Florentino Ariza’s god father was also alarmed at first by the patient’s condition, because he had the weak pulse, the hoarse breathing, and the pale perspiration of a dying man. But his examination revealed that he had no fever no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was urgent desire to die”. (pgs. 61-62)
This can really distort a reader’s perception on love as a whole. Although the degeneration of the body because of love is purely for literal purposes, there can be things interpreted as though love isn’t all its amped up to be. Therefore giving readers the perception to stray away from love that it alone may be a fatal problem. Overall the novel creates a fictitious presentation of love being deadly. Although some readers can read too deep into the presentation and as a result have mixes feelings about love, there is also an entertaining presentation that does give readers a delightful experience.

Works Cited
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love In The Time Of Cholera. New York and Canda: Vintage Books , 1988. Book.