A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
About the
Author
Gabriel
Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was Colombian-born Spanish American journalist,
novelist, and short story writer. He is regarded as the literary volcano of the
nineteen sixties and an exponent of a new narrative style known as magical
realism. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is taken as a classical
example of magical realism. Marquez is one of the best novelists of world
literature and perhaps the best in Spanish literature. For many readers,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and magical realism as synonymous with each other.
Magical Realism is a mode of narrative in which real and fantastic, natural and
supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of equivalence. Marquez’s
other best-known novels are No One Writes to the Colonel (1961), Love in the
Time of Cholera (1985), and Memories of my Melancholy Whores (2004). The story
‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ was first published in 1955.
‘A
Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is a magical realist story which examines the
human response to those who are weak, dependent, and different. The story shows
human nature-related curiosity, greed and cruelty.
Main Characters
Pelayo:
Elisenda’s husband who discovered of
the old man. Pelayo was an ordinary villager.
Pelayo’s wife who convinced Pelayo to
charge villagers to see the old man.
The priest of the village who was an authority figure in
the community.
The Neighbor Woman:
She was the neighbor of Pelayo and Elisenda.
She spider had the body of an enormous spider and the
head of a sad young woman.
Summary of the
Story
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is written by Grabiel Garcia
Marquez. He was Combodian-born Spanish American writer. It is a story of
magical realism. It examines the human response to those who are weak,
dependent and different. The story reveals nature-related greed, curiosity and
cruelty.
The story opens with raining situation. On the third day of
rain, Pelayo and his wife Elisenda were throwing dead crabs into the sea
because they thought that their newly born child had fever all night due to the
smell. The world had been sad since Tuesday. The light in the afternoon was
also very dim. Pelayo came back to his house. He saw something moving in the
courtyard. It was a filthy and weak old man with enormous wings there. He was
frightened by the nightmare. He ran towards Elisenda. They both came there and
observed the strange creature. They looked at him so long and so closely that
they they soon overcome their surprise. They tried to speak to him but they
could not understand his unintelligible language. They called a neighbor woman
who told them that he was an angel who came there for the child. She added that
he was very weak therefore he was knocked down by the rain.
On the following day, everybody found a flesh-and-blood angel.
Pelayo and Elisenda imprisoned him in the chicken's coop. In the middle of the
night their child became free from fever and felt hungry too. There were
arguments on whether the old man was an angel or not. Father Gonzaga tried to
investigate about the old man but could not. He tried to obtain the truth from
the church’s higher authorities. The news of the angel widespread very fast.
They made a plan to take charge 5 cents from the visitors as entry fee. The
couple started making money. People started mistreating the old man as he did
nothing to impress them. He was unresponsive to people's reaction. They poked
him and burnt him with a branding iron. Then the old man became violent due to
pain. He responded angrily, flapped his wings and yelled in a strange language.
A new carnival arrived there in the town. There appeared the
Spider Woman and people were attracted to her as they could ask her any
questions and she told her interesting stories to the people. Moreover, it was
less expensive to see her than the admission to see the old man. Because of the
woman, people's attraction to the old man slowly faded. However, Pelayo and
Elisanda were able to build a two-story house to be safe from the crabs and
angels from the money they had charged as entry fee.
Finally, the chicken coop got collapsed and the old man dragged
here and there. He appeared in the different areas of the house as duplicate
forms of him. One fateful day, while Elisanda was preparing food, she looked
through the window. She saw the old man trying to fly. At the beginning his
attempts were unsuccessful. But later on with attempts, the old man got success
to fly away from the house to the horizon of the sea. Elisenda got relieved as
she kept watching him go.
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