A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is a story that not only brings imaginary characters into play but also it combines imagination with events that we live everyday. For me, the background of the story is not unfamiliar at all, since the author Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born and raised in Colombia and I found most of the details of the story related to me when I used to live in South America. The magic realism used in this story illustrates many aspects of our society today. The reaction of the people in the town towards the appearance of an unknown creature with a bald skull, just a few teeth in his mouth and enormous and dirty wings resembling a rare angel, makes me think about how people are very intolerant to differences of other individuals. I concluded this when I read the part in which the angel is staying motionless lying on the ground surrounded by a bunch of hens and manifesting an inexplicable patience to the offenses of his audience throwing stones at him and trying to burn one of his sides to make him rise from the ground and perform any demonstration of his "powers". In top of that, the terrible smell and the parasites coming from the wings of the angel contributed to diminish the dignity the angel was supposed to deserve but instead he became a sort of circus animal being subject of ridicule. This lack of respect from many of the people trying to provoke the angel is a clear example of intolerance the author emphasizes in this story.

Another situation involved in the case of this angel has to do with the religious beliefs that were evident in the concurrence of the people that arrived at the town to see the angel. Even Pelayo and his wife gave him attention when according to a neighbor, he was really an angel that came to cure their child. But they accompanied his faith with making some profit fencing the yard and charging five cents to the people interested in visiting the angel despite of Father Gonzaga's advice to maintain prudence. Besides the ones that only wanted to fulfill his curiosity, there were some unfortunate that came from different places in search of health. And the superstition worked in some way but not in the way they wanted to be cured, like "the blind man that did not recover his sight but instead he grew three new teeth and the paralytic who did not get to walk but almost won the lottery" after visiting the bizarre angel. But the commotion finally ends when another weird creature