Love and Death Intertwined: A Literary Analysis
Love and Death: A Deep Dive into Character Relationships
This novel is a profound exploration of love and death, most significantly because the novel opens with a suicide and closes, near the end, with another. The title suggests that love and death, Eros and Thanatos, are united. The first sentence, “…inevitable,” dramatically increases attention, since “almonds” and “love” have a contextual synonymy, while the words that compose it form a list of antonyms: almonds (negative assessment) and love (positive).
Three Kinds of Love
The novel encompasses three kinds of love: platonic, lustful, and conventional.
- Platonic Love: This is defined as Florentino’s unattainable love for Fermina. It is a hyperbolic, exaggerated, almost obsessive love that lasts for more than 50 years. Their love began when they were young, but in Fermina’s “journey of forgetting,” all hope is lost. The triumph of love will not materialize until old age, until the twilight of the characters’ lives. Florentino idealizes his beloved, first as an impossible goddess and later as the crowned goddess—an idealization similar to Don Quixote’s. He expresses his love through music and messages. Florentino’s physical condition—the false anger and pain—is similar to that of Callisto.
- Lustful Love: After Fermina’s final rejection, a new kind of love opens up: sexual love. Florentino embodies the “Ars Amandis,” or the art of love, and he will have 622 lovers. He has an ability to attract women, especially widows. Among his lovers, we can emphasize Rosalia, his first relationship; the widow of Nazareth; Leona Cassiani; Olimpia Zuleta, who is killed by her husband; and America Vicuña, a young girl who commits suicide after Florentino abandons her.
- Conventional Love: This is represented by the marriage between Fermina and Juvenal Urbino, which persists for social facade and religious commitment. Fermina is chosen because Juvenal is a doctor and an important person in the village, and he can provide for her every whim. Florentino would not be able to give her all of that. For his part, Juvenal only needed a wife, as he already had prestige, money, and education. Over time, they lost the illusion of love, so much so that Juvenal was unfaithful. Their marriage was, essentially, a matter of image.
Infidelity and its Consequences
Juvenal also has relationships outside of marriage, notably with Barbara Lynch. Such infidelity hurts the marriage and generates mistrust and guilt.
The Interplay of Cholera and Death
Cholera and death go hand in hand. Death occurs at the beginning of the novel after the suicide of Jeremiah, caused by the fear of aging. The character most associated with death is, undoubtedly, Dr. Juvenal, who is always fighting cholera. Wherever he goes, there is always death, pestilence, etc. Death occurs in various ways: not only through disease, but also through the suicides of Jeremiah and America, and the violent death of Olimpia, beheaded by her husband for infidelity.
As events unfold, Florentino’s only possibility is to wait for his rival to die, so he can win back Fermina. After years of waiting, both characters have become irreparably old, but the only person who is not afraid of aging and death is Florentino, as he has waited all his life for Fermina. America’s suicide is one of the keys to the novel; a shared love between Fermina and America was not possible.
Symbolism: The Ship and the River
The ship, “New Fidelity,” symbolizes a microcosm for the birth of this new love between Florentino and Fermina. The river symbolizes life, “perpetuum mobile.” Finally, the novel closes when the flag of cholera is hung on the ship so that they will not touch land, and their love will endure forever.