Critical Analysis of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel García Márquez

The story is written in the vein of Magical Realism and concerns a couple of Pleyano and Elsendna who discover a man with huge wings covered in grime and lying down covered in mud. Is he an angel or supernatural being or just a man disguised as an angel? Márquez using the technique of magical realism portrays him as an angel.

Soon, a crowd of people gathers at the house to watch the angel’s actions. The populace is plagued with speculation about the angel’s plight. Some rant that he is part of a supernatural conspiracy. Others accept that he belongs to the underworld. Crowds flock to the house to seek blessings from him. Soon, Pelyano and Elsenda lock him in a chicken coop and start charging him a fee to observe this supernatural being. The parish priest also interferes and sends a letter to Rome seeking to give this angelic being a status. Pelyano and Elsenda get rich and change their accommodation to a two-story house. They get to a point where they want to get rid of the angel because they are fed up with it. To his surprise new feathers sprout on the angel’s wings and one fine day he takes flight and disappears.

As a technique of magical realism, the representation of the angel becomes a fiction where the belief is left to the credibility of the readers. One has to be convinced that fairy tales are true. The reader has to stretch his imagination to live by the standards of fiction. The enigma of the created angel does not surprise or astonish the reader. Márquez exploits the older genres of the fairy tale to create this strange mix.

The creation of the angel comes from Márquez’s hodgepodge of Catholic beliefs and becomes an amalgamation of an archetype that has a cosmic dualism of the divine and the profane. This can be seen as the guesswork of a writer agreeing to write fiction that is very immature. All the content of his fiction is very hyperbolic and has the atmosphere of a carnal and frivolous aura. The creation of the archetype proceeds from the writer’s unconscious. The archetypes have a rational explanation that is a sublimation of the unconscious instincts to a more conceivable and acceptable norm. On the one hand we can conceive his representation of the fallen angel and on the other a human portrayed with majestic features. There is a gutter in the great, a gutter with puddles of angelic fallibility.

The couple who discovers the fallen angel belongs to the proletariat. His aspirations are caught in the human thread of wealth. No doubt after the discovery of the angel, they rise in their social class positions and become very wealthy by charging a fee to see the angel. The author has a false conception of class and promotes the ideal of belonging to the bourgeoisie.

The plot of the story is not convincing at all. After being covered in dirt and mud, he suddenly sprouts new feathers on his wings and begins to fly. There is no believable plot at all. Postmodern fiction is moving into a realm of story making where plot is minimal construction. On the one hand, an angel is fiction and his resuscitation of the fallen in flight can be considered as a hyperbolic fictional embellishment.

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