A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

The residents of the little town in the story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” by Gabriel Marquez, did not understand that they very well could have been in the midst of one of gods’ heavenly creatures. The old man that Pelayo found groveling in the mud on the beach, had wings like an angel, he didn’t speak their language like an angel might not, and he was peaceful and innocent like angel might be. But since he didn’t fit the exact “standards” of grandeur that the people thought that angels should have, they disregarded him, and set him aside as being irrelevant and “…father Gonzaga was forever cured of his insomnia…” (403). In the text “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” the townspeople’s inability to determine the winged mans’ “being” highlights their paradigms.

The townspeople determine that the old man does not fit the “criteria” of an angel. They disregarded him partly because of “His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half plucked” (401), He was old and decrepit and seemed crazy. Also, Angels are thought of as elegant and beautiful with a sort of spiritual presence. But instead the old man looked like a “rag picker” (401), and smelled of the wilderness. Next, the priest tries testing the man to see if he could speak Latin, “the language of god.” But since the man could not speak Latin, he was under the “suspicion of an imposter” (401), he was thought of as the devils “carnival trick” (401). Moreover, the man’s main significant terrestrial qualities were his wings and his oddity. As far as how angels are thought of, The only other feature that closely resembled a celestial being was that he could take everything that his spectators did to him as if “His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience” (401). But his imperturbability and innocence are very misinterpreted by the people and taken advantage of to the extreme.

The townspeople are cruel and treat he man poorly because they don’t understand him. They pull out some of his remaining feathers to “touch their defective parts” (402). The people have the audacity to take from the man, without permission, in an attempt to add to themselves and seem to feel no remorse for their taking. Also, at one point in the story a spectator burns him with an iron for branding steers, because they thought that maybe he was dead.