Love In The Time Of Cholera Analysis

In Love in the Time of Cholera Garcia-Marquez tells a unjust story of love. The protagonist Florentino Ariza suffers through “fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights,” (Marquez 348) to be happily reunited with the love of his life. For Garcia-Marquez to allow one of his characters to endure such an awful experience he must have had discouraging encounters with love himself. Garcia-Marquez believes that love is an inevitable disease that we will all have to suffer through at some point in our life. At a young age Florentino Ariza caught a horrible sickness consisting of diarrhea and vomiting that became so severe his mother, Transito Ariza, called Florentino’s godfather who was an old homeopathic practitioner. They feared he may have Cholera. “But his examination 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” (Marquez 62). Garcia-Marquez hypothesizes that love is like Cholera. Once it enfuses its virus into you it slowly breaks you down bit by bit. Only a few lucky souls will avoid it, and
The yellow flag is a signal to other ports that a passenger on board is infected with cholera, but the only sickness infecting this boat is love. In this final part of the story we see how contagious love is as the captain and his lover are also willing to sail the seas forever with Fermina and Florentino. “So the New Fidelity weighed anchor at dawn the next day, without cargo or passengers, and with the yellow cholera flag waving jubilantly from the mainmast,” (Marquez 343) as the captain raises the yellow flag, Florentino completely surrenders to the disease he has been fighting his whole