SOURCE: Buehrer, David. “‘A Second Chance on Earth’: The Postmodern and the Post-apocalyptic in García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.” Critique 32, no. 1 (fall 1990): 15-26.

In the following essay, Buehrer discusses Love in the Time of Cholera as a postmodern novel that utilizes a traditional thematic structure.

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said in this very place, “I refuse to admit the end of mankind.” I should not feel myself worthy of standing where he once stood were I not fully conscious that, for the first time in the history of humanity, the colossal disaster which he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now simply a scientific possibility. Face to face with a reality that overwhelms us, one which over man's perceptions of time must have seemed a utopia, tellers of tales who, like me, are capable of believing anything...