Post #3

Love in the Time of Cholera is about a love that is innocent, and simple, but not exactly lasting. It is more of a feeling of freedom without responsibility or the post honeymoon feeling. Fermina falls for Florentino as her first love she believes as all do that it will last forever and then realizes the initial obsession and attraction isn't at all lasting or will bring her the life she wants. At the request of her father and in quest for a more stable life/love she marries Dr. Urbino, who provides her with a life that is more accustomed to her childhood and that Florentino could not provide. Cholera is a plague and I believe a symbol for the life we become accustomed to like the love Fermina chooses with Dr. Urbina. It is a safe, constant, love, but is plague like because it is not daring, or adventurous just steady until death. One could even argue trapping to an extent and that is similar to the plague. At the end of the book Fermina almost feels the release of her childish, limitless youth and that is her rekindled feeling for Florentino. Magical realism has many characteristics one being sort of making an ordinary subject or setting something symbolistic. The comparison or relationship between the trapped feeling of the disease and the lonely feeling of lost love or missing unclosured love is a universal feeling, but the way the book is written brings the concept out in an original way.