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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings - Short Essay

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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings - Short Essay
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” The story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is about an Angel that is stumbled upon by a Columbian family after he falls from the sky because of a bad storm. He is put in a chicken coop because the family doesn’t know what to do with him and later decides to let the towns people pay to visit to see him. The townspeople see him as a great creature until a “spider woman” comes along and the townspeople loose all interest in him for her. The Angel was very old, raggedy and couldn’t fly, that is until he builds up the strength enough to fly away at the end of the story. He stood out from the rest of civilization. Society likes to think of itself as being highly mind-opening. It seems like the people in the story didn’t want to believe that the man was an angel because they would have reconsider everything they believed in. Angels are usually thought to be very pretty and amazing looking, like a perfectly made doll with beautiful wings and being covered in pearly white gowns. People expect all of this but not an infested creature with diseases and is extremely filthy. We honestly don’t know exactly what angels look like. For all we know they could look like the angel in the story. In the story the priest tested the man to see if he was an angel and assumes he is an imposter because of the fact he didn’t speak the language of God, which is Latin. Though the angel didn’t pass any of the tests the preacher gave to him, the people believed that the man must be from heaven because there are no other feasible possibilities to his identity. The author stresses the fact that the humans are using the angel as a display of amusement. They see him as a creature that is needed for the world to enjoy to toy with and the author notices that this is the exact human ignorance that causes uncivilized behavior. If an angel were to be found in this day of age the townspeople would have reacted differently. Near the


Cited: 1) Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”. The Seagull Reader: Stories. Joseph Kelly. 2nd Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc: New York, 2008. Pp. 165-172
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