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Symbolism of Angel in a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Categories: A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings Novel Symbolism

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Published: Sep 1, 2020

Words: 560 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story, the skilled use of imagery and symbolism challenges conventional perceptions. The old man symbolizes both light and dirt, subverting traditional angelic imagery with his disheveled wings. This character's arrival blurs the line between the ordinary and the mystical, captivating the villagers and travelers.

The angel's connection to a sick newborn hints at a mysterious influence, and as he's locked away, the child's health improves, blurring the lines between life and otherworldly forces.

However, the villagers exploit the angel, turning him into a circus attraction for profit, leading to his deterioration. This narrative prompts us to reconsider our views on angels, raising questions about the extraordinary in everyday life and the complexities of human nature.

Marquez's narrative prompts us to reconsider our preconceived notions of angels, leaving us to ponder how our views might evolve if such an angelic being were discovered in our world. Ultimately, the story challenges our understanding of the extraordinary in the context of the everyday, reminding us of the complexities of human nature and our capacity for both wonder and exploitation.

Works Cited

Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2009). Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Bloom's Modern Critical Views). New York, NY: Infobase Publishing.
Cevallos, F. G. (1990). Gabriel García Márquez: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Consolo, V. (2003). Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Powers of Fiction. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Franco, J. (2010). The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
González, A. (2003). Gabriel García Márquez: A Life. New York, NY: Random House Trade Paperbacks.
Martin, G. E. (Ed.). (2007). Gabriel García Márquez: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York, NY: Twayne Publishers.
Mellen, J. (1981). Gabriel García Márquez. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers.
Pelayo, R. (2006). Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Biography. New York, NY: Greenwood Press.
Quiroga, J. (1997). García Márquez: El viaje a la semilla. Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Oveja Negra.
Williams, R. G. (1993). Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press.

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A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

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The Chicken Coop

Considering Pelayo and Elisenda were ready to send the old man off on a raft with food and supplies, their subsequent choice to instead lock him in the chicken coop as a kind of circus attraction is significant. They want to be rid of him and at first feel magnanimous at the idea of setting him free, but when they see he can help them turn a profit, they keep him captive. The chicken coop becomes a symbol of this greed. It also solidifies the old man’s status as a dehumanized animal; he becomes just another chicken that Pelayo and Elisenda “farm” to survive. Even the chicken coop receives more care than the angel himself: “If they washed [the coop] down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost” (Paragraph 11).

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Symbolism in “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Marquez

Symbolism is often employed in literature to represent, signify, and express ideas and qualities that differ from their literal sense in real life. As a literary device, symbolism can assume various forms by using abstract ideas to give an object a more vivid and deeper meaning by the use of symbols. It has become a very integral part of literature as it enables the creation of universal characters and themes. Moreover, authors have gained freedom as they give interpretation varyingly. For these reasons, many authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in his short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” greatly rely on symbolism to develop his characters and relay the significant themes of the story. There are several instances of symbolism in the story: the very old man with wings, the feathers of the wings turning dark in color at some point in time, a spider woman whose character depicts evil, and the greedy townspeople. In the end, this writing style helps to tell the idea that assumptions can lead to very severe actions.

An audience may draw several interpretations of the symbolism depicted in the Marquez’s work. An instance is the case of the old man with wings. Marquez describes the old man spotted by Pelayo and Elisenda as someone who was rather malformed, incongruous: “His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked” and a rag picker judging by his lanky looks (Garcia and Gregory 1). These negative connotations represent the life of a person who has undergone so much misery and has so much burden to bear. At first sight, the townspeople do not want to be associated with the old man and isolate themselves from him. The description of the old man’s wretchedness and despair is analogous to the real world, where people go through lots of challenges and problems, and most at times, their lives are torn apart through their experiences. After an inability to rise from such misfortunes, the world always seems to isolate from such kinds of people, just like the old man’s case. The author uses “the old man” in this context to represent anyone going through a cynical phase, mentally, physically, or financially.

On the other hand, the wings symbolize people’s various burdens in their daily endeavors. However, matters take a turn later in the story when the old man begins to grow new wings and can fly away: “at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow… But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them” (Garcia and Gregory1). The angel’s feathers begin to grow dark in color at some point. The dark-rugged feathers indicate the consequences of going through a tough time and adapting to the situation. Earlier, the author depicted the wings as dirty, sullen, soft, and dysfunctional. It was not until the dark feathers grew that he could fly. It shows that there is always a recovery time for anyone going through anguish and hope for better days, albeit the time needed for a person to resuscitate and rise like a phoenix.

Another character used to bring out the story’s theme was the spider woman. The writer labels the lady as “a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden” (Garcia and Gregory 3). The girl represents someone who had gone against societal norms as she had disobeyed her parents on one occasion. From the picture painted by Marquez and the girl’s nature as seen from her deeds, she represents evil in society. Such people are always a harbor for negativity and a constant source of unwarranted misfortune, just like in the real world.

The townspeople (villagers) symbolize society and how differently they react on various occasions. In this instance, the villagers are depiction greed. Pelayo and Elisenda go to the point of putting the old man on a display so that people could pay to see him. Despite the angel being meek and mild, the villagers torture and rile him up to see what he could do, “the most merciful threw stones at him… they burned his side with an iron for branding steers ” (Garcia and Gregory 2). Just like in the old man’s case, the people who held the spider woman captive charged people to see her. The two occurrences show how much greed the people bore and their cruelty towards outsiders.

Literary devices have been widely used in “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” especially symbolism that Marquez uses to develop the characters and the themes. Much as we never learn if the old man was an angel, he represents good in the story and calls society to incline towards charity and good deeds. Society is never always devoid of evil, and the author represents the same by using the spider woman’s nature and deeds. Humanity’s greed for wealth is also highlighted, and the consequences of baseless and biased assumptions are the advent of societal misfortunes.

Garcia, Marquez G, and Gregory Rabassa. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: And the Sea of Lost Time . 2014. Print

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Márquez, Gabriel García

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translated by Gregory Rabassa

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldnt get up, impeded by his enormous wings. Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. 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. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailors voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake. Hes an angel, she told them. He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down. On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayos house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiffs club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he werent a supernatural creature but a circus animal. Father Gonzaga arrived before seven oclock , alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captives future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts. His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel. The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldnt sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon. The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose. Father Gonzaga held back the crowds frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasnt just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put and end to the priests tribulations. It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didnt recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didnt get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angels reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayos courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms. The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldnt get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldnt get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didnt receive any attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth hed gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldnt resist the temptation to listen to the angels heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldnt understand why other men didnt have them too. When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that hed be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels. And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldnt get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him 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.

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The very old man with enormous wings: a tale for children.

The author I chose is Gabriel García Márquez (born March 6, 1927, Aracataca, Colombia—died April 17, 2014, Mexico City, Mexico), Colombian novelist and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, mostly for his...

The Theme of Religion in "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" and "Young Goodman Brown"

As we explore the differences and similarities of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “Young Goodman Brown” our focus will remain on how the theme of religion is portrayed throughout the stories. Religion is defined as “shared collections of transcendental beliefs that have...

Religious Symbolism in a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“A very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a story that was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This tale is about an elderly man with very huge and unusual wings who appears into the village courtyard and was found by a man named Pelayo. This...

Literary Analysis of a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

The narrator in “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children” consists of using characters logic for crucial determinants, creating false assumption, misleading who the angel really is. The false interpretation implied by characters redefines and shapes the overall view of the...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Critique of Human Nature in a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

In “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez mirrors the way humans tend to act in real life situations with how the townspeople, Pelayo, and his wife acted towards the angel. It also shows that Marquez has a negative view on human...

Depiction of Society’s Deficiencies in a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“A very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a magnificent illustration of society’s deficiencies. The story primarily focuses on individuals’ lack of value, judgements towards the neighbor and highlights the nature of human beings and inconsistency of faith by contrasting the...

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