Latin American Literature Commons^™

The Dangers Of Gullible Reading: Narrative As Seduction In García Márquez' Love In The Time Of Cholera, M. Keith Booker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera has frequently been read largely as a beautiful love story involving the lifelong fascination of Florentino Ariza with Fermina Daza and the eventual consummation of that fascination. Meanwhile, the text gains much of its energy from an opposition between the poetic romanticism of Ariza and the practical (though somewhat sinister) scientific thinking of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, Fermina's longtime husband. However, this opposition is not nearly as simple as it might appear, Ariza and Urbino being just as susceptible to the narrative of scientific progress as Ariza is to bad poetry, and …