Love and Death in Love in the Time of Cholera

For readers familiar with Love in the Time of Cholera, the themes of love and death would be constantly visited and revisited again by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novel, with a tad of heavy reliance on the cholera pandemic (as the title suggests not so subtly) and going so far as to intertwine them into a single notion (more often than not) throughout. Such a combination (and comparison) is most visible in Florentino, and helps shapes our emotions and thoughts about him as a character. Yet, in seeing how the author allows these themes to interact as merely a vehicle to power his characters and novel would be too simplistic an idea; instead, one should perhaps consider the alternative viewpoints of these themes addressing deeper concerns through differing interactions. Through a deeper exploration of how the notions of love and death are dealt by Marquez in Love in the Time of Cholera, perhaps one can hopefully seek an understanding of his underlying ideas within the novel, such as one which suggests them as components to “look beyond the apocalyptic impetuses of a ‘numb, recombitant’ postmodern fiction and to present a novel refreshingly traditional (or, one might say, post-apocalyptic) in its assumption that "old age, love and death" as human virtues can survive the ‘blast’ (here, the metaphor for apocalypse being the cholera epidemic), that subsurface feeling can incubate in and be unearthed from the fallout ashes, that the resources for self-renewal, contrary to the inevitablist theories, are possible” (Buehrer 15).
The first chapter of the novel opens with readers learning of the death of a Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, as examined by his close friend, a certain Dr. Juvenal Urbino. The method of death was judged to be one by cyanide. Right from the beginning of the novel, Marquez already allows the melancholic aura of death to permeate through, setting the tone (and somewhat foreshadowing) what is to come as the novel progresses. Saint-Amour also leaves behind

Cited: Buehrer, David. "`A second chance on earth ': The postmodern and the post-apocalyptic in Garcia Marquez 's Love in.." Critique 32.1 (1990): 15. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 27 Oct. 2011. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. Penguin UK, United Kingdom, 2008.