‘A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Short Story Analysis

I bring you a ‘Read of the Day,’ a short story, so that we can indulge in the joy of reading. You can visit my site to check a short story for analysis and participate in the discussion in the comments.

Read of the Day 

Today, we will read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

You can read the short story online here.

About the Author 

Gabriel García Márquez, also known as Gabo and Gabito, stands alongside Jorge Luis Borges as the most famous Latin American writers in history. Born in Columbia, he was a short story writer, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and journalist.

Gabito won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1982) for his fictional writings. Some of his widely read books are One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) and The General in his Labyrinth (1989).

Gabo was one of those few writers who achieved both commercial success and critical acclaim. He credits William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway as his greatest literary influences.  

Story Analysis 

Magic realism is the hallmark of Latin American literature. This genre seamlessly integrates the magic from their simplistic folklore stories with the realism in intellectual literary fiction. Little wonder we have so many Nobel Prize winning writers from that region alone: Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Angel Asturias (considered as pioneer of Magical Realism), Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course Gabriel García Márquez. From the winners, all used magic realism in some form except Gabriela Mistral, Octavio Paz.

Gabo takes on primal human nature and organised religion head-on through his fantastical characters in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings—a straightforward story narrated with detailed description in a poetic tongue.

“The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash­gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”

We have an angel in the form of a very old man with enormous wings specified in the story title. He lands out-of-nowhere in the backyard of Pelayo and Elisenda, who have a sick baby in the house. At first, they are horrified at the strange sighting, but on closer look, they find him familiar. 

A wise neighbour declares he’s an angel because of the wings. Father Gonzaga, the local priest, cannot come to terms with the fact that an old man who looks like a ragpicker, who’s covered with lice and has dirty, stinky wings can be a divine angel. The irony is Christ was born to a poor carpenter’s family in an inconsequential manger. Gonzaga writes to the parish higher authorities for answers. But they are as clueless as him about the old man with wings, as they are arguably about everything else in life and after. 

“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 wasn’t just a Norwegian with
wings.”

When the news of the mythical old man spreads, people from near and distant lands flock to see him. Elisenda has a brainwave, after which she sets up a fence, and charges people to see the old man with enormous wings. They alienate the old man by locking him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop.

If the couple isolates the old man with wings, their proverbial golden goose that makes theirs a classic ‘rags-to-riches’ story, then the visitors make a mockery out of him. From throwing fruit peels to breakfast leftovers and physically injuring him, they treat the old man like a circus animal for their sadistic entertainment until they move on to the next shiny object—the spider woman in this story. 

The ending is a chef’s kiss where Márquez makes us question our entire belief systems and values in this seemingly simplistic story with a very strange protagonist.

Márquez drives home the message that there is beauty everywhere. We just need to put our heart into our eyes. He does this effectively with the use of beautiful language and mechanism of contrasts. 

“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.”

Here the juxtaposition of ‘powdered light’ with ‘stew of mud and rotten fish’ or ‘chicken dung’ with ‘lunar dust’ brings upon the realization that there is beauty even in filth. There is beauty everywhere if we care enough to look for it. 

Everyone looks down upon the fantastical old man because he looks poor and frail—and is humble, patient, and kind. All divine angelic traits. But the fantastical old man angel is far removed from the cherubic winged angel—or the young, beauteous, sensuous, and virile female and male angels popularised in mainstream art and culture.

Of what use is then religion or humanity if we fail to see beauty everywhere? 

On that point to ponder, I’ll conclude my analysis with this classic quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Have you read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and what are your thoughts?