Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez depicted his parents’ romance throughout his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, basing it around his most significant theme, lovesickness. The concept of love was looked upon as a literal illness, as once one would enter its illusory concepts, their way of life would alter. It would corrupt one’s life as a drop of ink would taint the purity of water. As his parents struggled, like Marquez’s main characters, Marquez parallels Florentino Ariza as his philanderer father, who then courts his mother, portrayed as Fermina Daza. Marquez, being the manipulative cultural writer that he was, employed symbolism, as well as multiple other literary devices, throughout the involvement of the development of one of his secondary characters,

Reasons for Escolastica raising Fermina was for the sense that Lorenzo, Fermina’s father, was Escolastica’s brother, and as Marquez described, “His wife died when the girl was very young. His sister, named Escolestica, was forty years old, and she was fulfilling a vow to wear the habit of St. Francis when she went out on the street and the Penitent’s rope around her waist when she was at home.” (Marquez 235). This anecdote implies an allegory, as. ‘Escolastica’ translates to ‘teacher’, pertaining to an explanation regarding the way Escolastica is Fermina’s main role model. The semantics in the name ‘escolastica’, “But when the formal proposal arrived she felt herself wounded for the first time by the clawings of death. Panic-stricken, she told her Aunt Escolástica, who gave her advice with the courage and lucidity she had not had when she was twenty and was forced to decide her own fate.” (Marquez 71), Marquez provides a brief explanation of Escolastica’s childhood, and the way she reflected on her past relationships, as she attempts the prevention of Fermina making the same mistakes she did. This signifies the way Fermina and Escolastica share characteristics, facing similar

Though she is a nun, in supposedly possessing the belief of abstinence for their God, which opposes the approval of marriage, let alone conducting a relationship striving towards the marital process, exemplifies the irony in Marquez’s novel. The fact that Escolastica encourages her niece to proceed with marital intentions, rather than devote her life to their God goes against the societal norms of dedicated religious converts. Irony is also portrayed as “Aunt Escolastica had an instinct for life and a vocation for complicity which were her greatest virtues, and the mere idea that a man was interested in her niece awakened an irresistible emotion in her” (Marquez 58). In also contributing to the way Escolastica advocates for the marriage proposal between her niece and Florentino Ariza, this anecdote opens a door to the characterization of Escolastica as she is said to have a complicity in a crime, foreshadowing to the fact that she aids Fermina and Florentino to form relations among each other. Another way in which Escolastica went against her religion is as Marquez describes, “The truth was that Escolastica Daza has no other means of support except her brother’s charity and she knew that his tyrannical nature would never forgive such a betrayal of his confidence.” Indicating the way Escolastica deceives her brother for selfish reasons, and deception is a form of lying which