essay on the man with enormous wings

A Summary and Analysis of ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is a 1968 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). Like much of his fiction, this story is an example of magic realism (which we’ll say more about below).

Subtitled ‘A Tale for Children’, ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is about an elderly man with large wings who crashes into the home of a man whose son is ill. The townsfolk gather around to see the man, who some believe is an angel fallen from heaven. Before we offer an analysis of García Márquez’s story, here’s a brief summary of its plot.

Plot summary

The story begins with the titular old man with enormous wings crashing into the muddy yard outside the house of Pelayo, a man who lives with his wife, Elisenda, and their sick son. When the elderly man speaks, it is in a dialect they do not recognise and his accent is that of a sailor’s.

Their female neighbour tells them that the man is an angel who must have been coming for their son, but the incessant rain knocked him off-course. The next day, word spreads, and the whole neighbourhood turns up to take a look at the ‘angel’. By this time, Pelayo has confined the old man to his chicken coop and his son’s fever has abated. They had considered putting the old man on a raft with some food and pushing him out to sea, when their neighbours showed up to see the supposed angel in their midst.

As the day develops, the townsfolk begin to suggest what the fate of this old man should be: one thinks he should become mayor of the world, another reckons he should be made a five-star general, while one thinks he should be ‘put to stud’ so that he could sire a race of superhuman creatures.

The local priest then arrives to inspect the angel, and when the old man doesn’t understand the Latin the priest speaks, Father Gonzaga concludes that the man cannot be a true angel at all. His wings are too filthy, and he lacks the dignity one would expect from an angel. But the townspeople do not believe him, and continue to show up in greater numbers, wanting to see this angel for themselves.

Elisenda, spying an opportunity, decides to charge each of them an admittance fee of five cents if they wish to see the old man with wings. Over the next week, they make a fortune charging people to visit the angel, and their home becomes a site of pilgrimage visited by people with the strangest of afflictions. Speculation continues concerning the ‘angelic’ (or non-angelic) nature of the mysterious old man.

But then a travelling show arrives in town: a woman who was turned into a spider (a tarantula as large as a ram, but with a woman’s head) because she disobeyed her parents. Because the fee to see this ‘act’ is lower than the five cents being charged to see the angel, many townsfolk stop queuing to see the old man with enormous wings and instead go to see the spider-woman, who is also happy to answer all manner of questions about her unusual condition.

Although the queue of people waiting to see the angel disappears as the spider-woman lures away all of the waiting crowd, Pelayo and Elisenda are happy because they can use the money they’ve already made to build a better house. However, the continued presence of the angel in their yard becomes an annoyance to them. Their son spends time with the angel in his chicken coop, and both of them fall ill with chicken pox. They fear that the angel is going to die, but in time he recovers and flies away.

The subtitle which Gabriel García Márquez appended to ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ identifies this short story as ‘a tale for children’, and in many ways, the story might be analysed as a kind of fairy tale. Indeed, its central figure, the old man who may or may not be a genuine angel or some other strange supernatural being, can be viewed as a ‘fairy’ of sorts, whose arrival coincides with the improvement of Pelayo’s son’s health.

Like most good fairy tales, this story also fuses myth or fantasy with more everyday or realistic elements. This combination is also common, however, in works of magic realism : a literary movement with which Gabriel García Márquez was closely associated. In magic realist fiction, we are given a realistic view of the world but there are additional magical elements in the narrative as well.

In ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’, the key magic realist elements are obvious enough: a woman who has been transformed into a giant spider; a man who, angel or otherwise, has wings and is capable of flight.

These two beings are at the heart of the story and its meaning, which is as much about how groups of people respond to unusual elements within a society as it is about the two individuals themselves. Indeed, the old man with his enormous wings is something of a cipher: nobody knows what he thinks about anything because they cannot understand the language he speaks.

His main virtue, we learn, is patience, and he seems content to wait in the chicken coop and does not ask for much from Pelayo and Elisenda (who become very rich from him in a short space of time). The spider-woman, by contrast, was subjected to her supernatural fate because of disobedience – or, to put it another way, because of im patience, in that she wanted to go out to a dance but her parents forbade it, presumably on the grounds that she was too young.

These two special individuals – one very old, the other young; one male, one female; one patient and the other flighty; one capable of flight and the other earthbound – represent polar opposites in many respects. Indeed, whereas the old man is turned into a reluctant circus spectacle by his hosts, the spider-woman arrives as part of a travelling show, and intends to sell her story (as we’d say nowadays) and court public interest.

They also represent very different things. The townsfolk are sceptical of whether the old man is really an angel from heaven, but even after Father Gonzaga tells them outright that the man is no angel, they continue to turn up at the house so they can catch a glimpse of the mysterious figure. The spider-woman clearly has been transformed into an arachnid, as they can see this with their own eyes, but there are no heavenly claims made about her fate.

One question a reader of ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ might ask is whether the old man’s claims to ‘angelhood’ actually matter: if he is not angelic but merely a strange winged man, does that make him any less of a spectacle worthy of study and speculation? Clearly the ‘freakish’ elements of spider-woman’s affliction are enough in themselves to warrant crowds of people flocking (and paying) to see her.

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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translated by Gregory Rabassa

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings. Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake. “He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.” On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal. Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o’clock , alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive’s future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts. His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel. The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon. The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose. Father Gonzaga held back the crowd’s frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put and end to the priest’s tribulations. It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel’s reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo’s courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms. The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn’t get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn’t receive any attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth he’d gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn’t resist the temptation to listen to the angel’s heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have them too. When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he’d be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels. And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn’t get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”: Summary & Analysis Essay

The short story ‘A very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is basically a complicated narrative focused on a subject that is familiar to many people. It explores human nature where different issues such as indifference, greed and jealousy which are common in human beings are tackled. Marquez uses various literary techniques to narrate the story.

For instance, the fact that it is not easy to identify the actual main character in the story is a literary technique. While the old man with enormous wings seems to be the central character in the short story, he does not clearly appear to be the protagonist in the story. The author does not only try to invoke the thinking of the readers about their nature but also shows them how they should handle the seemingly small miracles that occur in their lives (Gradesaver 5).

The short story effectively brings out the theme of magical realism. The qualities of characters like Elisenda and Pelayo are combined with interesting qualities of the spider woman and the flying man to explain the major themes in the story. In addition, the author uses a unique way to describe the continuous rain that pounds the earth.

An ordinary setting where the homes of Pelayo and Elisenda are invaded by crabs and the muddy scenes of the beach brings out the message in story well. This dream like setting is important since it introduces the old man with enormous wings who is covered with tattered clothes and looks like a mythical creature.

At some point in the story, the angel is prodded since he is considered to be a funny creature. Marquez takes this instance in the short story to write powerfully about the angel by saying that he is the only one participating actively in his action. The only quality he possesses that could be described as supernatural is patience (Marquez 4). The author uses only two sentences to sum up the angel’s condition and the crowds of people. He compares the angel with the rest of the people to show how different he is.

His indifference causes disappointment in the crowd but he remains patient instead of condemning them. The story repeatedly makes allusion to the biblical story of Job who is compared with the angel. The angel and biblical Job are similar in that they both go through many tribulations but they can do nothing about their suffering. However, they exercise patience until they win their battles. Marquez tries to pass across the message that patience is itself a miracle.

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a short story full of satire. It generally satirizes the human nature and also criticizes the Catholic Church. Father Gonzaga seems unconcerned about discovering the mysterious nature of the angel although he is a religious leader. Contrary to what is expected, he is told to investigate whether the language the angel speaks has any connection with Aramaic language.

He is also told to determine the number of times the old man can be forced to go through the opening of a pin. The absurdity of the Catholic Church is depicted when the followers come to a conclusion that the old man with enormous wings might probably be a fisherman from Norway who got stranded. This conclusion serves to detach the Catholic Church from reality. However, the church seems to succeed in its tactics after the old man finally flies away (McDougall 59).

The criticism leveled against the Catholic Church in the short story is a reflection of the criticism that is leveled against all human beings in general because they do not value life. Human beings are presented as lacking in vision as evidenced by the wise woman who thinks that she knows everything.

Elisenda concentrates on looking for a procedure to follow and bothers herself with the selfish pilgrims instead of paying attention to the unusual beauty of the angel. However, she regrets her actions towards the end of the story after the disappearance of the old man. The message Marquez is passing across is that most human beings never realize their significance in the world.

Reading the short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” the reader cannot fail to notice the half-spider which is characterized by strangeness. Marquez uses imagery to expound on the most important needs of human beings. The spider is presented as giving attention to all those who need it and teaches them some lessons.

This quality combined with fear is typical of human beings. The implication from this scenario is that indifference is an undesirable quality among human beings. Marquez employs two distinct miracles to show the quality of human beings of ignoring what they consider inappropriate (Reinholtz 134).

When the angel goes outside the house, this is the period that Marquez writes some of the most interesting things about him. He says that she cannot stop looking at him even after she has finished her work and she continues watching until she cannot see any more. This is because he has ceased being a disturbance to her and has become a figure of imagination in her life.

Despite the fact that the angel has brought Elisenda many things such as security, good life and money, she cannot hide her joy when he leaves. Naturally, human beings might be expected to express ungratefulness and Marquez brings out one of the most important themes in the story, the failure of human beings to see what comes their way.

Though it might not be possible for human beings to have angels near them or experience miracles, they hardly appreciate things that are regarded as normal for them. Human beings may spend all their lives looking for something only to realize that what they are looking for disappeared from them without their knowledge.

The short story effectively brings out a disheartening mood and a sense of inspiration. The human beings involved in the story do not care about the suffering of their fellow human beings. The story is also inspiring in the sense that the old man with enormous wings is patient enough and battles with the difficulties he experiences until he finally attains freedom.

Most of the characters in the story possess qualities that many people would not want to be associated with. It is only the priest who is concerned about the old man with enormous wings and tries to find out his nature although he does not achieve much success.

The people from the town and those who come to visit are interested in finding out the nature of the old man but the theories they advance concerning his nature only portray insensitivity. Majority of the town residents including father Gonzaga view the old man as a creature that is not created by God.

Though Elisenda and Pelayo at first take some time to stare at the old man, their treatment towards him is careless and does not show any genuine curiosity. He is viewed as an unnecessary burden and though he brings them some money, they do not understand or assist him.

Works Cited

Gradesaver. A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings Summary and Analysis . 2011. Web.

Marquez, Gabriel. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing . New York: Longman, 2010. Print.

McDougal, Littel. The Language of Literature. New York: McDougal Littell Publishers, 2002. Print.

Reinholtz, Eric. Bloom’s How to Write about Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. Print.

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A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A very old man with enormous wings essay questions.

Discuss the role of the supernatural in Marquez's story

Do you think the village people are kind?

Does ritual and superstition play a role in the story? Discuss.

How does Marquez explore dualities in his story?

How does Marquez comment on the importance of interpretation both in human life and in the art of literature?

What affect does the combination of magical and ordinary details have on the reader?

Explore the differing uses of imagery in Marquez's story

Discuss how Marquez achieves a constant level of uncertainty in his story.

Compare and contrast the differing portrayal of the Spider-Girl and the Angel. Is there a wider purpose behind this contrast? How can the two be read as representing different approaches to literature?

How does the story comment upon humanity? Who is human in this story and who isn't? What qualifies someone as human?

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Which statement best identifies theme of the text?

Are you giving me choices to pick from?

"Which of these sentences" means that you have been provided with answer choices for your question. Please include all information in your posts.

Re-read paragraph 4. How does the language in paragraph 4 contribute to the tone of the story?

B. The straightforward, objective descriptions of the events and characters’ feelings create a removed, neutral tone.

Study Guide for A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings study guide contains a biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
• A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings Summary
• Character List

Essays for A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Human Nature
• Anorexics and Angels
• A Crab, a Spider, and the Noisy Stars Above: An Analysis of the Magical Absurdity in Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
• Illustrious Feathers
• Ambiguity in Gabriel Garcia Marquez: An Angel or Just "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings"

Wikipedia Entries for A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Magic realism

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

Gabriel garcía márquez, everything you need for every book you read..

In “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” religion is a hollow set of habits, rather than a genuine moral framework. When the angel falls to earth, he finds himself among Christians who should be delighted by the heavenly miracle of his existence. However, since the angel does not match their preconceptions of what an angel should look like or do, nobody treats him with either reverence or kindness. Instead of taking care of him or even having sympathy for his wretched condition, the townspeople either want something from him or see him as a curiosity. Even Father Gonzaga , the priest, fails to help the angel or recognize that he is sacred; instead, the priest gets distracted by sending letters to church authorities. In this way, Márquez suggests that genuine faith is easily perverted. While these characters are superficially religious, they lack actual faith, hope, or charity.

The angel is obviously a religious figure; though his wings are not in their best condition, he is still a supernatural creature that should amaze the townspeople and earn their respect. However, even though the townspeople understand that he is an angel, his pitiful appearance and odd behavior put off everyone who meets him. While the angel embodies the very wretchedness and destitution that Jesus says should be met with kindness and charity, the townspeople are so out of touch with their religion that they fail to carry out its basic principles. Furthermore, the angel’s presence also clearly evokes Hebrews 13:2: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” That is, practice the virtues of charity and kindness to everyone you encounter, because some of those people may be angels. The townspeople are in a situation in which they know that they are entertaining an angel—he’s not even in disguise—and they still fail to display any generosity of spirit. This shows how ineffective and shallow religion has become in this town. People consider themselves faithful, while behaving selfishly and even cruelly towards an angel.

Márquez suggests that the townspeople’s lack of genuine faith might be due to the Catholic church setting a poor example, as he satirizes the Church’s greed and pettiness. The exploitation of the angel is a clear comment on the money-making side of organized religion, as charging admission to see an angel is like charging to witness a holy relic or the discredited practice of selling indulgences (false promises to spare the purchaser time in purgatory in exchange for financial contributions to the Church). Furthermore, Márquez depicts Church officials as being too concerned with petty technical issues to understand that the angel is a genuine divine miracle who needs protection. Rather than helping (or even sympathizing with) the angel, the local priest, Father Gonzaga, examines the angel and determines (bizarrely, considering that this is a winged man) that the angel couldn’t possibly be divine. His criteria for this determination are strange: the angel’s failure to speak Latin or know how to properly greet a minister raise Gonzaga’s suspicions, and the angel’s “much too human” appearance confirms that he does not “measure up to the proud dignity of angels.” In light of the verse from Hebrews, which suggests that angels might often hide among humans, these do not seem like Biblically-coherent reasons to discredit the angel. Furthermore, Gonzaga suggests that the angel might actually be a “carnival trick” that the devil was using to “confuse the unwary,” and he notes that the wings are meaningless in determining the angel’s nature, since both hawks and airplanes have wings. Considering that this is a man with huge wings—one widely accepted to be an angel—these arguments seem like sophistry.

Father Gonzaga’s failure to understand the angel or treat him kindly does not make him a rogue representative of a Church that is respectable and faithful overall; when he writes to Church officials for a second opinion, their reaction is equally flummoxing. While Father Gonzaga hopes that the Vatican will tell them once and for all whether this is really an angel, the letters he receives from Rome “showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian with wings.” Clearly, Church officials are missing the forest for the trees: instead of delighting in the appearance of an angel, they have found themselves mired in arcane scholarly and taxonomical questions that have no relation to genuine faith. No wonder the townspeople have no sense of charity or empathy—their religious leaders are petty and insular, unable to recognize clear miracles or condemn the cruel treatment of the angel.

The Vatican’s inability to act in the face of the townspeople’s injustice towards the angel parallels the Church’s frequently slow response to social change in the real world: on issues of gender equality, for example, the Catholic church has remained more traditional than many other religious institutions that opened leadership positions to women. Márquez, therefore, depicts the Catholic church as being out of touch with the problems of its followers and indifferent to the morality it ostensibly espouses, while the story’s Catholics—without role models in their religious leaders—are shown to be cruel and selfish, despite their professed faith.

Faith, Religion, and Morality ThemeTracker

Faith, Religion, and Morality Quotes in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels.

He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decrepitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars.

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

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Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted outlines. Cite details from the play over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. The community in the story would likely have reacted differently if the character with enormous wings had been a woman rather than a man.

• How might the story be different if the old man with enormous wings had been a woman? ( topic sentence )
• How does society treat women differently than men—both for better and for worse?
• Why does the author place a man in the role of the character with enormous wings?

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2. Márquez provides a detailed description of the old man with enormous wings.

• How does the author describe the old man’s appearance? ( topic sentence )
• How do these characterizations imply that the old man with enormous wings is a fallen angel? Why would this matter in the context of the story?

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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings Critique Essay

Literary Analysis of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” “When Pelayo and Elisend first find the fallen man, they regard him as human, he is “dressed like a ragpicker”” (McFarland). Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a fabulous story about an angel in “pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather” with “Huge buzzard wings” (Marquez 294). Marquez uses magical realism to express the literary elements of the old man, in third person point of view, and with several interpretations.

In the short story, Marquez shows two major elements of magic realism. The two elements were the old man and, the girl who has been turned into a spider. The people in the story treat the old man as an oddity. He was not treated like an angel instead he was treated more like a freak of nature. The old man appears to be nothing more than a frail human with wings, and so his status as an angel is endlessly debated. “What surprised him the most, however, was the logic of his wings.

They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have them too” (Marquez 298). Father Gonzaga thinks that he cannot be an angel because he lacks dignity and splendor. “Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of god” (Marquez 295). Of course this begs the question of whether the angel lacks dignity, or whether he just lacks dignity because of the way he is treated, being imprisoned in a chicken coop.

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Perhaps it is the people who lack dignity, not the old man. The old man's other supernatural characteristic is his incredible patience in the face of his treatment which does not make much of an impression on the majority of the people, who are happy to exploit him until bored with him. The magic realism for Spider-Girl is a clear contrast with the Old Man; whereas, he is difficult to interpret because he is not trying to please the crowd. The Spider-Girl delights the people with the clarity of her story. while still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woodsafter having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent through the sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider” (Marquez 297). “When a new spectacle arrives, the woman who has been changed into a spider for disobeying her parents, the community shifts their attention to her. A typical carnival hoax or sideshow “freak”” (McFarland).

Unlike the Angel, the people do not debate her status as a spider; it is taken for granted. The story is written in third person point of view, in the eyes in Pelayo, in order to show the isolation of the old man is feeling. As the story begins and as Pelayo finds the old man, he does not understand who or what the old man is, until he hears the old man’s “sailor’s voice”. “This explanation is merely arbitrary, however, because basic logic rejects the interpretation and makes Pelayo’s explanation merely humorous” (Slomski).

The story makes it difficult to understand how the old man is feeling due to the point of view it is written. If the story is switched to the point of view of the old man, it would be easier to understand the feelings and alienation the old man is being faced. “They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later finds him in the kitchen” (Marquez 298). This quote displays the alienation the old man felt through Pelayo’s eyes. “The second interpretation is made by a neighbor woman who is thought to know “everything about life and death. The humor of her interpretation arises in the certainty with which she pronounces that the old man is an angel” (Slomski). Marquez use of magical realism and literary elements, in a third person point of view, proved many interpretations. “Thus, the Magical Realism of Garcia Marquez’s style — a blurring of the division between the real and the fantastic — is used to underscore the notion (indeed, the seeming contradiction) that the irrational is a natural part of life” (Slomski). By analyzing, the literary elements of third person/omniscient point of view, imagery and characterization are what alienate the fabulous characters.

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