An Old Man with Very Large Wings

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” I normally would hate this style of writing; in fact, I did hate it until we dissected and discussed it in class. I’ve always stood by the essentiality of a story to be simple. The words were fairly simple, and the story was easy to read, but the storyline was very atypical. Even though I did find it confusing to understand and grasp, I really loved the meaning behind it. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a masterfully written story laced with complexity and underlying meaning. A man named Pelayo was out by the sea walking home and found an angel. This was no aura of light, golden winged creature, so beautiful you shutter in its presence: it was an old man who was so weak and frail he couldn’t keep his own face out of the mud. “His pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather had taken away and sense of grandeur he might have had.” (Marquez 365) Marquez does a phenomenal job of describing the angel. You can clearly picture the angel and his condition. This is crucial for the development of the story. The family took the angel and locked him up in their chicken coop. When they woke up the next morning, the entire neighborhood was in their back yard trying to see the angel. There were groups of people around the chicken coop throwing him food as if he were a circus animal rather than a supernatural creature. So many people came to see him that the family started charging admission to see the angel. The angel spent his time balled up trying to get comfortable in the pin. “His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience.” (Marquez 367) He showed with this sentence that he really wasn’t anything spectacular, just a pitiful creature that lied down all day. One day he had been lying motionless for so long the spectators thought he was dead and the chickens were trying to peck bugs out of his wings. One observer stuck a branding iron to the angel’s side. “[The angel] brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar

Cited: Marquez, Gabriel Garcia “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Literature: An Introduction to fiction, poetry, drama, and writing. 12th Ed. Dana Gioia and X.J. Kenny. New York: Pearson, 2013. (364-369)