In Love in the Time of Cholera, the author expresses Fermina as being someone who does not love. She only finds someone to fulfill her needs. At one point in the third chapter, the author says that she is haughty and that she inquires. She has never expressed the emotion of love. She is hardened. She has married someone who is willing to love her, instead of Florentino who is willing to love for the both of them. Dr. Urbino is young and lusted after; therefore, it is easy for Fermina to see that she would want someone that other people want. He is also successful which her father, and friends would like to see. She has married up in the world.

Her choice of marriage might mean nothing to her. This is the person for which she is suppose to grow old with. She grows to live with him, not love him. He has grown to love her for perhaps different reasons, maybe one of respect, or unity. She has never gotten the chemical feelings of love when she has been around him, only lust. This book divulges into the differences with Florentino especially. He is beginning to try to fill the void that Fermina has created. She is living her life as she needs to, but is too naive to realize that she is missing love. How is she to know what love feels like, or if it even exists? She has been hardened from the experience with Florentino. She thought she loved him, but from her father making her leave him, she created an elaborate illusion in which reality was not better.

Love is not definable. It has no boundaries. You cannot even call it love for that is setting it into a binary to love someone, and to not. There are all kinds of degrees of love. A person can only give out so much of one kind. Fermina gave out her heart to Florentino, and she has not discovered that she has given it out yet. She is living life to its standards. Love has no standards, and the reader pities Fermina for her lack of experience with love. Florentino is driven by it. He cannot seem to get rid of it. She has tried to fill it as well, but they are both being told at different ends of the story still attached by each running paragraph.

The End of "The Sound and the Fury"

I have just finished the novel, and it has left me feeling very empty. It offers a stable enough resolution, a quiet one in which the reader is aware through Jason of the happy ending with seeing his unrest; however, it also ends with Benjy upset and unsatisfied with his own existence. Everything just seems to keep going at their residence with everything else going on outside of it that affects them. It seems as though no one is ever satisfied. Each one has their own identity which is exemplified in their sections. They all have their own lives, and affect each other unknowingly, and almost selfishly. I cannot tell if this is a wholly bad thing. Every one has their own problems, and their either too young or too immature to deal with their own as well as everyone’s beside them. The family is tied with painful love for a number of different things which all lead to their demise. This can be a love for money, for each other, for one’s self, or a search for love. Every one of their lives keeps going on and on as more unrest occurs within their family walls. Who can be the one to solve it? Does there have to be a savior in this family, or can they proceed to go on with their lives or not with selfishness? As a reader, it is depressing to witness a family’s solution being one not tangent to the norm of all good endings. A good ending is one in which all are happy, and the evil is eliminated. In this ending, the evil is all around them, and is not entirely eliminated, nor will it ever be. What is deemed right is thrown out the window, and leaves the reader thinking if everyone simply wastes their life with sitting around all day as events move around them, as it appears in this novel. Life is not planned out by any number of characters, but is taken as it comes; the only exception would be with Quentin when he obsesses with time and how it should be spent. This book leaves the reader confused with what life’s time should be spent doing. Is it constantly a waste, or should it be taken as it comes and large events should not be expected or prepared for, but taken as they come up? Everyone has their problems, some are worn on their sleeve such as Caddy, or Quentin, but by entering in all of the characters minds, we find that everyone has the problems they must deal with whether they be other’s or their own. I actually felt bad for Jason for not knowing what he did was wrong, or perhaps he did know, and that was why he was so emotionally invested. I actually felt bad for him even though he was making derogatory anti-feminist remarks. I ended up feeling bad for all people, whether they have problems that could easily be posted in a newspaper and evoke pain, or even just make them passionate. (511)