The Depressing and Dignifying Everyday Life in the novel «Love in the Time of Cholera» by Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel is about love and cholera, as the title suggests. However, the plot is far from either. Garcia Marquez created a life story of two characters that slowly passes in a provincial Colombian town on the bank of the Magdalena River at a time of a cholera epidemic. He showed how truly incredible miracles can happen in the «quiet story» of everyday life. Love in the novel is not a loud drama, but a titanic effort of the soul against the despondency of everyday life, the «cholera» of the time and conventions, in which the characters live for decades. Everyday life is the contradictory duality of life itself, which is inextricably linked to death: life can de joyful or sad, happy or unhappy, successful or unsuccessful. Social dichotomies of the time, such as poverty vs. richness, traditional vs. bourgeois lifestyles, rational vs. irrational actions permeate the everyday life of the characters. The poles of life form rigid dichotomies of thought patterns and behavior, i.e. decent and indecent, acceptable and unacceptable, permissible and impermissible, etc. Conventions, restrictions and barriers separate the characters like cordons sanitaires . Each character has their own destiny and remembers their first love in their own way. The paradoxical essence of the novel is rooted in the contact of opposites, in the existential nature of life, which is the heart of the routine and the sublime at the same time. Dichotomies have no power over love, and real life eschews their dubious oppositions. This is where the path to Garcia Marquez’s magical realism begins, with everyday life becoming mystical. The ambivalence of everyday life and the symbolism inherent in it are key to unraveling the novel. Garcia Marquez deliberately creates a monotonous narrative so that love can shine through the layers of time. Love is not a passion, but the air of the novel, which the characters and the reader breathe, while everyday life is not a background, but a protagonist, which the alchemical actions of the author transform into eternity, opening unknown horizons of love at all times of life, even during the «cholera».