Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Cyyanide Poisoning

In the novel, Marquez has used his language skills to paint love as not always being a good thing. An example of this use can be found on the very first page, when Dr. Urbino compares the scent of cyanide to the fate of requited love. Now for some this may not mean anything, but later on the author writes that Doctor Urbino’s friend Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, who has died due to self-inflicted cyanide poisoning. Marquez is describing how love can be a poison and of how deadly it is. Something that’s even more interesting about cyanide poisoning is the symptoms that accompany it: weakness, giddiness, headaches, vertigo, and confusion just to name a few. Some of these could be related to love and its aftereffects. Everyone reacts to a breakup differently, whether it be physically or emotionally. Now back to the sentence itself; since poisoning eventually leads to death the author is trying to tell us that unrequited love almost always
ends up badly for the lover(s). The very first sentence is a metaphor for reasons already explained.
Another interestingly written point in the novel is when the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera (p62).
Again Marquez uses a metaphor when Florentino has an encounter with Fermina and goes home sick. We can see it here “…. he had the weak pulse, the hoarse breathing, the pale perspiration of a dying man […..] To conclude once again that explicitly drive the point that love is destructive and is never always a good thing. I can’t help but wonder if Marquez thinks love to be sort of a sorry joke as if he kind of likes to look down on people who fall in love considering the fact that he was 61 when this book was released. It’s like he’s writing about his own experience as a lover. Writers can draw upon their own experience when writing realistic fiction; that’s what makes it so realistic. Marquez has many pearls of wisdom hidden throughout the entire book. Usually when a character opens their mouth for dialogue they have said something either useful or meaningful. On page 168 we have a dialogue between Uncle Leo and
Florentino
“Love is the only thing that interest me,” he said
“The trouble,” his uncle said to him,” is that without river navigation there is no love.”
Now considering the fact that Marquez is in his early sixties we can assume that this quote came from experience. Marquez has some considerable life experiences under his belt. What if the novel and some of the aspects of it were actually taken from his own personal life? I want to draw attention to the last section of the quote, the fragment about river navigation. What if Marquez is trying to tell us that seeking out love and being unexperienced in the ways of love? What Uncle Leo means by the statement is that without guidance love can lead you down the wrong path and that the path will not necessarily end in a place that works out for everyone. It’s Marquez’s insightful language that helps drive some of these lessons hard into the mind of the reader. Florentino’s heartbreak is discernable, when he hears that Fermina is marrying and the pain he experiences when she is forced to move and leave him behind. Florentino never fully recovers from the lovesickness produced by Fermina Daza.