Narrative as seduction
Some critics choose to consider Love in the Time of Cholera as a sentimental story about the enduring power of true love. Others criticize this opinion as being too simple.[5]
This is manifested by Ariza's excessively romantic attitude toward life, and his gullibility in trying to retrieve the sunken treasure of a shipwreck. It is also made evident by the fact that society in the story believes that Fermina and Juvenal Urbino are perfectly happy in their marriage, while the reality of the situation is not so ideal. Critic Keith Booker compares Ariza's position to that of Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, saying that just as Nabokov's Humbert, despite being a "pervert, a rapist, and a murderer," is able to charm the reader into sympathizing with his situation with his first-person account, Márquez's Ariza is able to garner the reader's sympathy, even though the reader is reminded repeatedly of his more sinister exploits through the charming third-person narration.[5]
Relationship between love and passion
The term cholera as it is used in Spanish, cólera, can also denote passion or human rage and ire in its feminine form. (The English adjective choleric has the same meaning.) Considering this meaning, the title is a pun: cholera as the disease, and cholera as passion, which raises the central question of the book: is love helped or hindered by extreme passion? The two men can be contrasted as the extremes of passion: one having too much, one too little; the central question of which is more conducive to love and happiness becomes the specific, personal choice that Fermina faces through her life. Florentino's passionate pursuit of nearly countless women stands in contrast to Urbino's clinical discussion of male anatomy on their wedding night. Urbino's eradication of cholera in the town takes on the additional symbolic meaning of ridding Fermina's life of rage, but also the passion. It is this second meaning to the title that manifests itself in Florentino's hatred for Urbino's marriage to Fermina, as well as in the social strife and warfare that serves as a backdrop to the entire story.
Aging and death
Jeremiah Saint-Amour's death inspires Urbino to meditate on his own death, and especially on the infirmities that precede it.[6] It is necessary for Fermina and Florentino to transcend not only the difficulties of love but also the societal opinion that love is a young person's prerogative (not to mention the physical difficulties of love when one is older).[7]
