Analysis Of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

When society grows to expect the divine in times of need, skeptics arise to chastise the legitimacy and quality of a gift from heaven, lamenting what could be described as a miracle as lacking in the quantity of holiness as society desires. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a political and religious allegory written in Columbia in 1955 and detailing the decaying faith in the hearts of Columbian citizens during La Violencia, a period the World Peace Foundation describes as “a scene of widespread and systematic political violence” caused by “a breakdown of existing institutional structures and a partial collapse of the state” (“Mass Atrocity Endings”). Commenting on how the political collapse and immense
As John Goodwin analyzes, the angel falling down to Earth in Pelayo and Elisenda’s courtyard symbolizes the futile, decaying faith of the people of Columbia during the time of the short story’s publication (Goodwin, "Márquez's ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ and Bambara's ‘The Lesson’"). Misunderstood in the very literal sense in this text, as not even priests nor the neighbor who was described to “know everything about life and death” (Marquez, 388) are able to decipher the angel’s language, in times of societal horror, religion is doubted and misunderstood as it does not appear to deliver the blessings of hope and prosperity spiritual texts optimistically ensure in times of need. However, even when humanity is at an all-time low, miracles are just as abundant as ever, if perhaps lacking the manner and weight in which one would typically describe a miracle. The angel in the text is accredited several seemingly minor and disappointing miracles for a
At first, their neighbor instructs Pelayo and Elisenda to execute the angel, as an angel was likely a harbinger of misfortune, being that at that time angels on Earth were seen as exiles of the divine, however they do not and Marquez uses rhetorics insinuating a positive, merciful approach the family took towards this outsider. However, despite the angel appearing completely human other than his wings, and their initial perception of him as a castaway from a shipwreck, throughout the course of the story the family hardly treats him humanely. He resides in the family’s chicken coop like an animal, the family allows the town and tourists to gawk at him like an attraction at a zoo, he is merely fed scraps from his visitors, and they do not prevent the tourists from harming him as they “pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with,... threw stones at him” (Marquez, 390) and even branded him. The lack of humanity towards this outsider is rather disturbing, especially as his humanity is readily described to the reader. Roland McFarland points out in his literary criticism that the narrator states that his immense amount of patience for everything the townsfolk have done to him seems to be the only thing supernatural about him, yet he’s still described as an “angel” by the narrator to exemplify the way he’s still seen as nonhuman (“Community and Interpretive Communities in