At the beginning, it had been raining for 3 days and crabs were everywhere. Pelayo and Elisenda's child was supposedly sick

because of the crabs' stench. An old sickly man is found on the shore with enormous wings. When the couple attempts to

communicate with the old man, his incomprehensible language (which is never identified) leads the couple to believe he is a

castaway. A neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death tells the couple he is an angel. Pelayo decides to lock

the angel in a chicken coop overnight and then send him on a raft to his fate. Early the next morning the local priest, Father

Gonzaga, comes to the home, followed by the rest of the community, to test the old man and determine whether or not he

truly is an angel. Ultimately, Father Gonzaga finds many reasons why the man cannot be an angel, such as the fact that the old

man cannot understand Latin, and also because he has too many mortal characteristics. Elisenda, tired of cleaning up the

visitors' messes, decides to charge an entrance fee of 5 cents to see the angel, which eventually allows them to amass a

fortune.

The crowd soon loses interest in the angel because another freak has risen to fame. The new attraction is a woman who

disobeyed her parents when she was young, and has since been transformed into a tarantula. In order for her to continue

telling her story, the people of the town toss meatballs into her mouth, which was "her only means of nourishment." Though

the people of the town no longer see the angel, the family had saved up enough money to build a mansion with balconies and

gardens and nets. The angel's health declines, and it seems he is on the verge of death. When his last winter in the chicken

coop is over, he suddenly becomes more healthy and grows a few new feathers. At first, he roams around the house, but

Elisenda keeps shooing him out of the rooms with a broom. One day he leaves the house and begins to fly away

Magical Realism = Themes

The Coexistence of Cruelty and Compassion

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” wryly examines the human response to those who are weak, dependent, and

different. There are moments of striking cruelty and callousness throughout the story. After Elisenda and Pelayo’s child

recovers from his illness, for example, the parents decide to put the old man to sea on a raft with provisions for three days

rather than just killing him, a concession to the old man’s difficult situation but hardly a kind act. Once they discover that they

can profit from showcasing him, however, Pelayo and Elisenda imprison him in a chicken coop outside, where strangers pelt

him with stones, gawk at him, and even burn him with a branding iron.

Amidst the callousness and exploitation, moments of compassion are few and far between, although perhaps all the more

significant for being so rare. Even though he is taken in only grudgingly, the old man eventually becomes part of Pelayo and

Elisenda’s household. By the time the old man finally flies into the sunset, Elisenda, for all her fussing, sees him go with a

twinge of regret. And it is the old man’s extreme patience with the villagers that ultimately transforms Pelayo’s and Elisenda’s

lives. Seen in this light, the old man’s refusal to leave might be interpreted as an act of compassion to help the impoverished

couple. García Márquez may have even intended to remind readers of the advice found in Hebrews 13:2 in the Bible: “Be not

forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

Motifs = Prosperity

Pelayo and Elisenda’s newfound prosperity is the physical manifestation of the magic and wonder the old man brings to their

lives. As the story opens, the couple lives in an almost comical state of poverty as swarms of crabs invade their home. Even

worse, their young son is deathly ill. The old man, however, brings hundreds of pilgrims who don’t mind paying Pelayo and

Elisenda a small fee for the privilege of seeing him. The proceeds bring Pelayo and Elisenda a new house, a new business, and

more money than they know how to spend. This remarkable turn in fortune happens so gradually that Pelayo and Elisenda

don’t really see how remarkable it is. Elisenda even refers to her new home as a “hell full of angels” once the old man is

allowed inside after the chicken coop collapses.

Symbols = Wings

Wings represent power, speed, and limitless freedom of motion. In the Christian tradition, angels are often represented as

beautiful winged figures, and García Márquez plays off of this cultural symbolism because, ironically, the wings of the “angel”

in the story convey only a sense of age and disease. Although the old man’s wings may be dirty, bedraggled, and bare, they

are still magical enough to attract crowds of pilgrims and sightseers. When the village doctor examines the old man, he notices

how naturally the wings fit in with the rest of his body. In fact, the doctor even wonders why everyone else doesn’t have

wings as well. The ultimate effect is to suggest that the old man is both natural and supernatural at once, having the wings of a

heavenly messenger but all the frailties of an earthly creature.

The Spider Woman

The spider woman represents the fickleness with which many self-interested people approach their own faith. After hearing of

the “angel,” hundreds of villagers flock to Pelayo’s house, motivated partly by faith but also to see him perform miracles—

physical evidence that their faith is justified. Not surprisingly, the old man’s reputation wanes when he proves capable of

performing only minor “consolation miracles.” Instead, the spectators flock to the spider woman, who tells a heart-wrenching

story with a clear, easy-to-digest lesson in morality that contrasts sharply with the obscurity of the old man’s existence and

purpose. Although no less strange than the winged old man, the spider woman is easier to understand and even pity. The old

man, barely conscious in his filthy chicken coop, can’t match her appeal,even though some suspect that he came from the

heavens. Márquez strongly suggests that the pilgrims’ result-oriented faith isn’t really faith at all.

Satire

1. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so

closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar.

Pelayo and Elisenda’s initial impression of the old man’s wings as the filthy limbs of a scavenger rather than the glorious wings

of an angel is a good example of how García Márquez grounds even his most fantastic elements in the grunginess of daily life.

The second sentence in particular clues readers in to one of the central elements of magical-realist fiction—reawakening

readers’ sense of wonder at their own world. García Márquez suggests that if people can become inured to the presence of a

winged man in a story, then they can just as easily overlook the wonders and little miracles of real life. A story such as “A Very

Old Man with Enormous Wings” is meant to serve as a reminder that everyday life is filled with great mysteries and wonders

that people overlook too often.

2. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism

that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have them too.

When both the old man and Pelayo and Elisenda’s son come down with chicken pox, the local physician takes advantage of

the opportunity to examine the “angel” physically. The doctor is surprised both that the old man is still alive and that his wings

seem so natural on his body. In this passage, García Márquez seems to imply that there is nothing angelic about the old man

at all, although the narrator goes back to referring to him simply as “the angel” a few lines later. More important, the passage

suggests that the boundary we draw between natural and supernatural is arbitrary at best. García Márquez subtly raises the

question: if wings are so naturally a part of this particular man’s body, then are we the freaks for not having them?

The Old Man

The Old Man is "Dreaming" in the story. He first appears in the backyard in the mud. The family is first hesitant about what he

is, so they make him live in the chicken coop. He is very dirty and he speaks an incomprehensible language that no one

understands. When the crowds first start to come around, he is absentminded and patient about what's going on. The crowds

come from all over the world to see him so he becomes a celebrity. Later, the crowds burn him with a branding iron and he

flaps his wings in pain. In the end, he grows all of his feathers back and he flies away.

The old man, with his human body and unexpected wings, appears to be neither fully human nor fully surreal. On the one

hand, the man seems human enough, surrounded as he is by filth, disease, infirmity, and squalor. He has a human reaction to

the people who crowd around him and seek healing, remaining indifferent to their pleas and sometimes not even

acknowledging their existence. When the doctor examines him, he is amazed that such an unhealthy man is still alive and is

equally struck by how natural the old man’s wings seem to be. Such an unsurprised reaction essentially brings the “angel”

down to earth, so any heavenly qualities the old man may have are completely obscured. However, the narrator seems to

take the old man’s angelhood for granted, speaking of the “lunar dust” and “stellar parasites” on his wings, and the old man’s

“consolation miracles,” such as causing sunflowers to sprout from a leper’s sores, seem genuinely supernatural. In the end,

the old man’s true nature remains a mystery.