The Handsomest Drowned Man Analysis

Even though Márquez does make these two stories very different, he does give them the same motifs. Both A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World have a heavy focus on death and rebirth. The death in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings can be seen in the fact that the neighbor said, “[The angel] must have been coming for the child” (2). She was saying that the angel came to take the soul of Pelayo’s sick child. The rebirth in this story can be seen at the end of the story when the angle had a fervor and “they thought he was going to die” (8). On that same page, the angel was reborn when his feathers grew back and he was finally able to fly away. These motifs are seen more easily in The Handsomest Drowned