Short Story 'A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings'

Human Response to Strangeness

In Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” the main character, Pelayo, encounters a supernatural being which he abuses to gain monetary value. When the strange man with wings came, the whole town was baffled and mesmerized because they were all curious of where the man is from. In the character of the old man with wings, García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” exemplifies the relationship between tolerance and suffering.
In the beginning of the story, “Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw [crabs] into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench” (535). The short story begins by describing
He was dressed like a rag picker. 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 had taken way any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud” (535-536).
The narrator describes how miserable the old man is in. “Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiffs 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” (536). Pelayo’s actions implies that he views the old man like a fugitive. The old man is seen as a monster that needs to be incarcerated because of its potential to hurt people based upon his appearance. As the story progressed, “they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest tolerance, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal” (536). The lack of respect and belittlement of the neighborhood toward the old man, implies how being different is a disadvantage. The next morning “he was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peel and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him” (536). The old man first seen as an angel is treated like an object without emotions.
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” (537). The old man’s unsanitary captivity in the chicken coop permits the existence of a foul odor which Pelayo and his family has to deal with. As the chicken coop was destroyed “the angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man [in Pelayo’s house]. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen” (538). The existence of the old man became a usual sight in Pelayo and his family’s life. As time passed by “he seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he’d been duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that is was awful living in that hell full of angels” (538). Naturally, living with an angel is considered heavenly but the old man’s suffering made Elisenda’s life miserable which resembles the old man’s life as their