ralph

Angel

In the story “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel

Garcia Marquez a man named Pelayo is taking crabs to throw into the sea when returning he finds a man with wings. He then runs to tell his wife of this and in turn they both tell their neighbor who “knew everything about life and death”(Marquez 84). It was not until the neighbor came that the thought of this man being an angel was even introduced into the story. The thought that this thing was an angel is inconclusive since the only evidence given for this conclusion is that it had wings. The fact of whether or not this creature is an angel is never really stated in the story. From what I gathered from the text I am not sure myself. The part that makes this so hard to believe that this is an angel is that it has no real reason to be there. The only information added in to the story that comes even close to being a viable reason for this to be an “angel” is that the child of Pelayo is sick and so they think that he is there to take the child from them. When the three had come to the conclusion that he was an angel of death their first reaction was to kill the man. This can be thought of as society’s usual impulse of automatically wanting to destroy the strange or unfamiliar instead of trying to learn from it. Luckily for the man,

Pelayo can not bring himself to kill him, this inability to kill the man leads me to believe that Pelayo is the representation of kindness and compassion in this story. This compassi...