Love In Time Of Cholera

3 Pages 683 Words

In “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Garcia Marquez
uses a love story to criticize the social inequities
existing in Latino America. Moreover, he exposes the
way that social institutions act together to keep the
social inequities, and how the poor submit to their
fortune without hope for change.
The story takes place in Colombia at the end of
the 19th century, in a Caribbean city next to a
seaport. There are three major characters in the
story. One of them is Florentino Ariza, a sentimental
man whose excessive romanticism compels him to worship
a woman that he hardly knows. At first sight he falls
in love with Fermina Daza, a beautiful young girl, and
later on he spends three years exchanging romantic
letters with her; however, after returning from a long
trip, she is disenchanted by Florentino’s appearance
and terminates the flirtation. Fermina Daza then meets
Dr. Juvenal Urbino and ends up marrying him after a
short engagement. Nevertheless, Florentino Ariza is
already obsessed with her and waits over fifty years
for her husband to die, so he can have a second
opportunity.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino is a aristocratphysician who studies
medicine in Europe and returnshome wanting to improve the
sanitary conditions of the town in order to prevent another
outbreak of cholera.
The story itself develops in a society where the
difference between social classes is evident. The city
was once an important slave-trading center; the slave
trading brought so much abundance to the town that
many of the houses in the wealthy neighborhood are
designed in a pretentious European style. However, the
civil war and the abolition of the slavery system
bring to an end the abundance of resources and the
town falls into disgrace. The aristocracy holds to the
memories of a glorious past that is long gone. In
fact, after Dr. Juvenal Urbino returns from Europe, he
is surprised by the way the aristocrats pra...