A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(1927-2014) was a 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.
• Characters:
1. The Angel/The Old Man: Pelayo discovers an
elderly guy with gigantic wings resting in the mud of the courtyard, and he and
his wife imprison him in a chicken coop. Not only does the old guy have wings,
but he also talks in a dialect that no one understands.
2. Pelayo: Pelayo, Elisenda’s husband, discovers
the old guy with wings lying in the mud. He makes a lot of money by exhibiting
the old guy, and then he constructs a big building with a rabbit warren.
3. Elisenda: Pelayo’s wife is the one who comes up
with the idea of charging an entry fee to visit him to make a lot of money
after seeing the crowd.
4. The Child: Pelayo’s child is sick when Pelayo
finds the old guy, but his fever comes down through the night. When the angel is
no longer a carnival attraction, the child occasionally plays with him in the
chicken coop.
5. Neighbour Woman: The neighbour woman knows
everything there is to know about life and death, and she claims that the
elderly guy is an angel who was probably on his way to save their ill kid when
he was pushed down from the sky by the rain.
6. Father Gonzaga: Before becoming a priest, Father
Gonzaga worked as a woodcutter. His perspective on the old man differs from
that of the neighbour woman. He advises the crowd to treat the angel kindly and
with dignity, even if he doubts him.
7. The Spider-Girl: The spider girl is the woman
that transforms into a spider. She’s a carnival attraction. She was once a
young maid, but one night she fled from her house to dance, and when she
returned home, a lightning bolt of brimstone transformed her into a large spider
known as a giant tarantula. She ate the meatballs thrown at her by the
audience.
• Summary:
A Very Old Man With Enormous
Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez narrates the story of Pelayo and his wife
Elisenda, who discover an old man with wings in their courtyard after killing
crabs in a rainstorm.
Pelayo, a poor fisherman,
discovers a homeless, disoriented old man with incredibly huge wings in his
courtyard. The old man speaks in an unfamiliar language. As a result, he and
his wife speak with him in vain. Pelayo and his wife, Elisenda, believe after
consulting a neighbour woman that the old guy must be an angel that attempted
to come to take their sick child to heaven. The neighbour woman advises Pelayo
to club the angel to death. And they lock the angel in the chicken coop, and
their child’s fever breaks in the middle of the night. As a result, Pelayo and
Elisenda feel sorry for their visitor.
The local priest, Father Gonzaga,
tells the people that the old man is most likely a fake angel because he is
shabby and does not speak Latin. Father Gonzaga decides to seek advice from his
bishop. He promises to obtain the true truth from the church’s higher
authorities. The news of the angel travels like wildfire, and the courtyard
quickly takes on the appearance of a marketplace. Elisenda then comes up with
the brilliant idea of charging a 5 cent entrance fee to visit the angel; they
become rich very quickly. The old man mostly ignores the crowd, even when they
pull his feathers and throw stones at him to get him to stand. When the
visitors sear him with a branding iron to determine if he’s still alive, he
becomes angry. Rome takes its time determining whether or not the old guy is an
angel, and while waiting for their decision, Father Gonzaga works tirelessly to
keep the crowd under control.
When a travelling freak show
featuring a Spider-Girl arrives in the village, the crowd begins to disperse.
Spectators are permitted to question her, and she tells them how she was
transformed into a tarantula one night for disrespecting her parents. This is
more appealing to the general public than an old winged man who ignores the
people around him. As a result, the curious crowds immediately ignore the angel
in favour of the spider, leaving Pelayo’s courtyard empty. The sad story of the
spider woman is so well-known that people quickly forget about the old guy, who
had only performed a few meaningless semi-miracles for his pilgrims.
Despite this, Pelayo and Elisenda
have become very wealthy as a result of the admittance fees Elisenda has
imposed. Pelayo quits his work and begins construction on a new, larger home.
As the small boy grows older, the elderly man stays with them for several
years, living in the chicken coop.
They ignore the angel and keep
their kid away from the chicken coop. He quickly becomes a part of their lives,
and they begin to accept him. The child pays him frequent visits. When the
chicken coop falls, the old guy goes into the adjacent shed, but he frequently
wanders from room to room inside the home, which annoys Elisenda.
He becomes increasingly weak and
sick, and they believe he will die. But he quickly recovers. His feathers
regrow, and he starts singing sea chanteys (sailors’ songs) to himself at
night. Elisenda watches as the elderly man extends his wings and flies off into
the air, and to her relief, he disappears beyond the horizon.
To conclude, the old man appears
as an eponymous (wrongly titled) persona who appears in a family’s backyard on
a stormy night. It also shows the combination of reality and illusion – a story
that appears real yet contains elements of imagination.
Understanding the text
Answer the following questions.
a. How does the narrator describe the weather and its effects in the exposition of the story?
Answer: It had been raining for three days in the
exposition of the story, and Pelayo was dumping the crabs inside his house into
the water. The sea and sky had become a single ash-grey entity, and the beach’s
sands, which had glinted like powdered light on March nights, had turned into a
stew of mud and decaying shellfish.
b. Describe the strange old man as Pelayo and his wife first encounter within their courtyard.
Answer: When Pelayo and his wife Elisenda came across
the unusual elderly man in their courtyard, they discovered him dressed as a
rag picker (a person who collects and sells rags). Only a few faded hairs
remained on his bald head, and he was in the terrible condition of a drenched
great-grandfather, his large buzzard wings dirty and half-plucked entangled in
the mud.
c. Why did Pelayo and Elisenda imprison the old man in the chicken coop?
Answer: Pelayo and Elisenda imprisoned the old man in
the chicken coop after discovering that he was an angel who had come with a
plan to take their child.
d. Why was Father Gonzaga not sure about the old man being a celestial messenger?
Answer: Father Gonzaga was not sure about the old man
being a celestial messenger since he noticed that he didn’t even understand
God’s language or how to greet his ministers.
e. Many people gathered at Pelayo’s house to see the strange old man. Why do you think the crowd assembled to see him?
Answer: Many people gathered at Pelayo’s house to see
the strange old man. I think the crowd assembled to see him as they found him
inside the chicken coop and wanted to have fun with the angel as a circus
animal.
f. Some miracles happened while the crowd gathers to see the strange man. What are these miracles?
Answer: Some miracles happened while the crowd gathers
to see the strange man. These miracles are:
- The blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth,
- The paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and
- The leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers.
g. State the irritating things that the people did with the strange old man.
Answer: The crowd began to irritate the strange old
man since he was unable to impress them. They pulled his feathers and threw
stones at him to get him to stand. They poked him with a branding iron and
burned him. The old man did not react to them at first, but he eventually got
aggressive due to unbearable pain.
h. How and why was the woman changed into a spider?
Answer: Because she had sneaked out of her parents’ house
without permission to dance and had disobeyed her parents, the lightning bolt
of brimstone came through the crack of the tow of the fearful thunderclap in
the sky, and the woman was changed into a spider.
i. Describe how Elisenda saw the strange man flying over the houses.
Answer: Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions
for lunch when she sensed a wind coming in from the high seas and ran to the
window, where she observed an angel making his first attempts at flight. He
kept his balance and made it through the last few houses, miraculously holding
himself up with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept looking at him
until she couldn’t see him anymore.
Reference to the Context
a. The arrival of a strange old man at Pelayo’s courtyard arouses many suspicions and explanations. Explain how the neighbour woman, Father Gonzaga and the doctor speak of the strange man. Why do you think these three people give three different kinds of interpretations?
Answer: The arrival of a strange old man at Pelayo’s
courtyard arouses many suspicions and explanations. He was an angel who must
have come for the child, but he was knocked down by the rain due to his old
age, according to the neighbour woman who understood all about life and death.
When the old angel could not understand God’s language or how to sense his
ministers, Father Gonzaga, the parish priest, doubted him. Because his weak
feathers smelled of the outdoors, he warned others against being ingenuous to
avoid the risks of being curious. The doctor discovered a whistling sound in
his heart and kidneys, indicating the impossibility of his being alive, and he
was shocked to see his natural wings and wondered why others didn’t have them.
The strange old man is described
differently by the neighbour woman, Father Gonzaga, and the doctor. These three
persons, in my opinion, presented three separate explanations for the strange
old man because his appearance and activities were utterly different from those
of the actual world. He had wings, and his language was also not understandable.
b. This story belongs to the genre of ‘magical realism’, a genre perfected by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novels and short stories. Magical realism is a narrative technique in which the story-teller narrates the common place things with magical colour and the events look both magical and real at the same time. Collect five magic realist happenings from the story and argue why they seem magical to you.
Answer: This story belongs to the genre of ‘magical
realism,’ a genre perfected by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novels and short
stories. For example, the title “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” portrays
the old man as a magical character or a being from a mythical world. Five magic
realist happenings from the story are listed below:
- Pelayo was returning to the home after throwing away the crabs when he saw an old man lying face down in the mud, hindered by his enormous wings. It is magical in the sense that humans in this physical world do not have wings.
- During the talk with Pelayo and his wife, the old strange man responded in an unfamiliar language with a strong sailor’s voice, indicating that he was from another planet.
- The old man, according to the neighbour woman, is an angel who has come to take the sick child to heaven. The word “angel” itself refers to a magical link in the story.
- Father Gonzaga equated the strange old man with the devil and warned others about him. Capturing the old man and the description of Father Gonzaga is equally amazing and magical.
- The transformation of the woman into a spider as a result of the brimstone lightning bolt, the doctor’s prediction regarding the strange old man and his observation of a whistling sound in the old man’s heart and kidneys, the old man’s antiquarian eyes, his first attempt at flight and then his passing over the last houses, and many more are not normal events in this physical world. As a result, the storey falls under the genre of ‘Magical Realism.’
c. The author introduces the episode of a woman who became a spider for having disobeyed her parents. This episode at once shifts people’s concentration from the strange old man to the spider woman. What do you think is the purpose of the author to bring this shift in the story?
Answer: The author introduces the episode of a woman
who became a spider for having disobeyed her parents. This episode at once
shifts people’s concentration from the strange old man to the spider woman. I
think the author’s intention in introducing this change in the story is to
demonstrate a magical connection between two separate events. Because the
storey has elements of magical realism, the author intends to depict something
strange or amazing happening in the world to tie the storey to the world of
magical realism.
The Strange old man is given a
sense of “magic realism.” He portrays humanity’s blindness to beauty and mercy;
he is a sort of Christ figure. The Spider-girl is a character in a travelling
carnival show that visits the village. A spider-girl happens to be the main
attraction. The villagers are shocked. Watching her is much less costly, and
she entertains the audience, whereas the shy angel recoiled from the attention.
This is more appealing to the general public than an old winged man who
overlooks the people around him. The curious masses quickly depart from the
angel in favour of the spider, leaving Palayo’s courtyard vacant. The morality
story behind the spider girl of disrespecting her parents and God turning her
into a spider was also well received by the audience. The crowd has almost
completely forgotten about the angel. It also argues that people prefer
interesting and entertaining activities to serious ones.
d. The story deals with the common people’s gullibility. How do Palayo and his wife take advantage of common people’s whim?
Answer: A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings is a short
storey about the common people’s gullibility. Pelayo and his wife Elisenda
discover an old guy with wings in their courtyard and attempt unsuccessfully to
talk with him. Then they get their neighbour woman, who tells them that the old
man is an angel and that it was on its way to take their sick child. They place
the angel in the chicken coop, and their child’s fever breaks in the middle of
the night. They decide to let him go, but when they return to the courtyard at
dawn, the entire community has gathered to watch the angel’s appearance. Father
Gonzaga arrives soon afterwards, saying that the old man is a fake.
He promises to obtain the truth
from the church’s higher courts. The story of the angel travels like wildfire,
and the courtyard quickly takes on the appearance of a marketplace. Elisenda
then comes up with the brilliant idea of charging a 5 cent admission fee to
visit the angel; they become wealthy very quickly. While they await their
judgement, Father Gonzaga works tirelessly to keep the crowd under control. In
this way, Pelayo and his wife take advantage of the common people’s whim by
charging visitors to see the old man.
