Lovesickness And Promiscuity

Garcia Marquez, considered one of the most prominent authors of the 20th century in the Latin American even throughout the world literature, was the representative of Magic realism. People in China began to notice Marquez’s works after his winning of the Nobel Prize in the 1980s, and after that most of his works have been introduced to China and translated into Chinese. Thereafter, Chinese scholars started to study his works. Because of the ring of the Nobel Prize, most of the attention was paid One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Magic Realism in it. Another world famous book, Love in the Time of Cholera, according to Marquez himself, was his best book. But this book just slipped away in public sight. Few people did any research in Love in the Time of Cholera, which led less attention to the figures in it.This thesis is mainly focusing on the analysis of the image of Ariza, who is one of the leading characters in Love in the Time of Cholera. This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part is concentrated on the discussion of Ariza’s lovesickness. Through the analysis of his words and deeds, his persistent lovesickness with Ferminais apparently revealed to the readers. Ariza lived most of his life under the pain of lovelorn. In his youth, he showed his romantic love for Fermina fervently. When in middle age, he began to hide his romantic love in the bottom of his heart. But in his old age, after the death of doctor Urbino, who was Fermina’s husband, Ariza got the opportunity to show his love to Fermina, and he won her love. By analyzing the three stages in Ariza’s life, we can better understand his persistent lovesickness and the changes of his love mentality as time went by. Then the first part ends with probing into the reason for his persistent lovesickness.The subject of the second part is to highlight Ariza’s promiscuity. After Fermina married to Urbino, Ariza started the relationship with 622 different kinds of mentally wounded women, among whom there were widows, black female, married women, even prostitutes and so on. Ariza kept unstable, crazy and abnormal sex relationship with them so as to offset the pain and loneliness without Fermina. In so many times, the desire, which was to get sexually satisfied in order to heal the pain in his heart, drove him to the sexual addiction deeply. By the analysis of his crazy promiscuity, the aim is to trace back to the cause of his promiscuity.The third part is to demonstrate the entanglement of the lovesickness and promiscuity in Ariza. Besides it reveals the image value of him. The lovesickness results in his promiscuity, and the promiscuity is a diversion and remedy for the pain caused by his lovesickness. The basic purpose is to prove that Ariza maintains his ideal love by extreme means and he believes in true love. By revealing Ariza’s difficult process to procure his love, it points out the image value of Ariza endowed by Marquez.