love does indeed triumph; at least a kind of love. The lovers are finally united when he is seventy-six and she is seventy-two. This time they journey together up river aboard theNew Fidelity, raising the yellow flag of cholera to prevent them from ever again touching shore. Yet the romantic idyll is deliberately clouded by the encroachment of a world defiled by disease, decay, and impending death. In essence, the lovers have little in which to rejoice except for illusion. "All that was left was the vast silence of the ravaged land."

This final image reinforces the thematic concern of appearance versus reality, which pervades the novel from beginning to end. Life in Garcia Marquez's fictional setting is often marked by mystery, detachment, and hypocrisy. Likewise, each of the major characters creates a persona by which to be identified within the community. Class difference is clearly part of this methodology and allows Garcia Marquez to enrich the novel with underlying strength. Florentino and Dr. Urbino represent opposite ends of a social spectrum in which Fermina lies curiously in the middle. As a result, the novel becomes a vehicle for Garcia Marquez to explore the qualities of love.

LoveLove in the Time of Cholera tells the story of the lifelong love of the illegitimate, and once poor, Florentino Ariza for Fermina Daza. Their teenage love had been sustained largely by his letters as she was sent away by her ambitious father. But when they suddenly met after this long separation, her "illusion" of love, as she then saw it, was immediately dispelled. She rejected him to marry, although also after a period of rejection, the socially well-placed Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Much of the book is taken up with a study of this marriage and of the many affairs by which Florentino tries to fill the space left by Fermina while waiting one day to possess her. Urbino's death in his eighties allows Florentino to resume his courtship of and eventual marriage to Fermina. The novel's major themes are thus concerned with love and passion as well as aging, decay, and death.

From one point of view the marriage of Urbino and Fermina is merely a fifty-year interruption of Florentino's courtship. Yet it also proves to be the route to the final romance, since both characters develop significantly from their experiences during this period. It is the marriage that gives Fermina her realistic appreciation of romance. Marriage is not merely an obstacle. The relationship has been passionate, affectionate, boring, angry, and desperate.

The novel is thus a celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women. In part it is a brilliant account of a long marriage; elsewhere it is a tale of love finding erotic fulfillment in old age. In relating both the story of Fermina Daza's marriage and her later courtship, Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel about commitment and fidelity under circumstances that would seem to render such virtues absurd. It is also about a refusal to grow old gracefully and respectably.

A central idea of the novel is the primacy of passion and feeling over order, honor, duty, and authority. Love and sexual desire control, invigorate, and at times lay havoc upon lives. Sometimes the participants are burnt up as if by cholera, after which they may completely recover, may be extinguished, or, as with Florentino, may linger on in a state of perpetual convalescence. In Garcia Marquez's work, life and love are shown as unpredictable and turbulent, forever surging and overflowing their bounds.

Aging, Decay and Death Aside from love, the process of aging, decay, and death is Love in the Time of Cholera's most important theme, and the two are linked in a defiance of society's prejudice against the sexuality of the elderly. Garcia Marquez keenly observes the process of aging and continually brings up the details of its encroachment. At the same time he proclaims a dignified old age and the right to companionship and pleasure. Fermina Daza's two children are typical of society's cruel and thoughtless attitudes about sexuality and aging. In typical Garcia Marquez fashion, there is a circular pattern to aging as presented in the novel, and the author observes on many occasions the return to characteristics of infancy and the reversal of the roles of parents and children.

Florentino is both intense about love and philosophical about age. Florentino sees death as a bottomless pit where memory trickles away. He is a patient man, and the delicacy with which he seduces Fermina, and the nature of their companionship during the final stage of their long lives defies shallow stereotypes. The novel is a meditation on decay, old age, and the dying process. The main characters' biographies are laid out from childhood to near death. They reveal lives actually lived, and the means by which memory can transfigure, keep alive, and obliterate both the pain and passion of the past.