Enormous Wings

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings opens at noon “on the third day of rain”(327) on the land of Pelayo and Elisenda. Pelayo is sweeping piles of dead crabs out of his home because the smell of the invading animals has made he and Elisenda’s newborn son ill. On his way back inside Pelayo notices something squirming on the ground ahead of him and discovers “that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings”(327). The reader assumes the obvious when they are presented with the image of a man with wings, he is an angel, and this is also the conclusion of the couple’s neighbor. The twist, however, is that in the following
The next morning they find that their child has begun to heal, seemingly due to the presence of the angel, and a crowd has gathered around the coop. The story continues with the angel becoming a major public attraction, Elisenda charging people in order see it, and explaining the seeming disdain the angel has for “mere mortals”. This continues until a new attraction comes to town and Pelayo and Elisenda use their saved up money to renovate everything on the property except the chicken coop, which they forget about. The coop falls apart and the angel spends his days wandering around the couple’s property, being shooed out with a broom when he entered the bedrooms, and surviving the harsh winters despite his fragile state. The story ends with the angel flying away “Elisenda [letting] out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she [sees] him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile
The basic idea behind reader response criticism is that a piece of literature does not have one meaning, and instead the meaning changes based off of the thoughts, experiences, and mood of the reader. As with all works of literature, the purpose is to make the reader think more deeply than they typically would, and Marquez does an exemplary job of this, subtly weaving in emotion that can even be detected on a first reading. A fantastic example can be found in the beginning of the story when the reader is given the image of an angel and then immediately Marquez turns that idea on its head. Readers get the distinct feeling of confusion and fear felt by Pelayo and Elisenda, and likely by the angel. Another sterling example of the emotions in the story is the final sentence; “[Elisenda] kept watching [the angel] even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.” The reader gets a full sense of closure and the feeling of relief, a weight being lifted off their shoulders at the angel’s departure. Marquez also presents a series of emotions in the scenes in which he describes the angel’s seeming disdain for the crowd around him. Every reader would be able