I spaced actually publishing these to the main page. If you would still rather write about Heart of Darkness, you can take until the 28th. Love in the Time of Cholera essays are still due on the 27th. 1. Chinua Achebe argued that Heart of Darkness is an “offensive and deplorable book” that “set[s] Africa […]
Fun story. Last summer, I wrote a topic paper advocating that the high school debate community debate Africa for a year. You can find the paper here: www.nfhs.org/core/contentmanager/uploads/Africa06.pdf Today, while researching, I came across a newspaper in Africa that was eerily familiar: http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/africa/2006/0723poverty.htm Lesson of the day? Don't plagiarize, kids.
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In an historic moment, Juvenal Urbino transports an entire piano to serenade Fermina. Dressed in his Sunday suit, Florentino Ariza weeps as he plays a love waltz composed for Fermina Daza. In Love in a Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez describes two men in love with the same woman. Márquez expresses his attitudes towards love by contrasting Urbino and Florentino. He chooses to write of both Urbino and Florentino’s serenades, but views each situation differently. Urbino’s serenade he relates matter-of-factly while Florentino’s waltz is portrayed more complexly with ridicule and sincerity. Márquez’s use of tone illuminates the dichotomy of love he creates in Love in a Time of Cholera.
He was a perfect husband: he never picked up anything from the floor, of turned out a light, or closed a door. In the morning darkness, when he found a button missing from his clothes, she would hear him say: “A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.” Every day, at his first swallow of coffee and at his first spoonful of soup, he would bread into a heartrending howl that no longer frightened anyone, and then unburden himself: “The day I leave this house, you will know it is because I grew tired of always having a burned mouth.”
In the restorative idleness of solitude, on the other hand, the widows discovered that the honorable ways to live was at the body’s bidding, eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone.
Without true love and in a superficial and pressure filled world, Fermina Daza represents every woman and man that suffers from an imprisoning marriage. She finds herself in a marriage that has compromised her joy and love for life, while instead she has secured a high social and economic standing. Throughout the book Marquez establishes a theme of love and its presence, or lack there of, in marriage. The marriages throughout the book illustrate the boredom, fake happiness, and a forced loved that marriage can result in. The sarcastic and mocking tone toward marriage in these passages reinforces the idea of critical evaluation of marriage and true love that is seen throughout the book.