An Old Man With Enormous Wings, By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Angels are known for their halos and glowing auras, their miracles and bringing of hope. Gabriel Marquez dispels this image in “An old man with wings”. Through unexpected turns in his story, Marquez displays that expectations hinder people's ability to be open to new possibilities.
Marquez takes a well-known figure, an angel, and completely reverses the character in his story. In the first paragraph, Marquez describes the angel as “an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud”. This description is almost the complete opposite of how an angel is commonly described. Already Marquez defies the reader's expectations and opens their eyes to a new possible story. Marquez continues to expand the possibilities of his stories through his characters unexpected reactions. “Angels in those times were fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy”. The author introduces magical realism through incorporating angels in a realistic story, allowing the characters to react in
unexpected ways. “They did not have the heart to club him to death”. The reader must further retract their expectations as they can no longer sympathise with the humans. By every character acting counter-intuitive to what the audience would expect, Marquez has shown that people's expectations restrict their ability to consider alternative possibilities. Not only does Marquez uses the angel to defy our expectations, but the characters as well.
“They burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for they thought he might have been dead”. The characters interacted with the angel not based on how the angel had treated them, but based on their expectations of what an angel should be. The characters limit their ability to see the possibilities of an angel by acting based solely on expectations. Throughout the story, the wife resents the angel, even until the end. “He was no longer an annoyance in her life”. But because of this resentment, she failed to see the angel had brought her “A two story Mansion, Gardens, high netting” and more. This resentment by the wife closed her eyes off to the positive possibilities that the angel could bring her. The author emphasizes the fact that our release of expectations could bring more happiness, as shown through giving the wife riches, but having her ungrateful to the angel, of whom had brought the
riches. Marquez defies the reader's expectations, and brings a new interesting story. He defies his character's expectations, and shows the reader what the character’s possibilities were, had they released past expectations. The readers and characters display expectations of which in turn are shown to hinder their ability to be open to new possibilities.