Love in the Time of Cholera Lesson Plan

Analyze the narrator's description of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour escaping the "torments of memory" through suicide (3). What does this mean?

In this aphoristic statement, the narrator is essentially equating the experience of life with a sequence of rememberences, which are inherently tormenting. Life, it would seem, is not the experience of living, but of remembering your life and being tormented by regret. This sets a fascinating tone for the novel, suggesting that throughout the novel's explorations of love and longevity, the understanding will be that, for the most part, all of these experiences eventually get filed away in our memory to torture us at some point in...