Features Of Magic Realism In A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” sudden guest descends from the sky, and appears to test the confidence of a town. The townspeople have a troublesome time making sense of exactly how the elderly person with wings fits into their lives. Since this character doesn’t fit with their idea of what an angel is supposed to resemble, they attempt to decide whether the old man could really be an angel. In attempting to demonstrate the source of their guest, the locals lose confidence in the plausibility of him being an angel since he doesn’t fit into their image of an angel.
Marquez keeps the identity of the angel hidden, to show the lack of faith of the townspeople in believing in miracles that do not fit into their standard glorified religion.to keep the identity of the old man secret, Marquez utilizes a strategy known as magic realism. This mix of the real world and fantasy removes some of the greatness that is normally expected from angels. when the man is first presented he doesn’t slide from paradise in a burst of light and wonder, yet rather arrives in “stew of mud and rotten shellfish’ (Marquez 405). during a storm that had gone on for three days. To research the ‘moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard’ Pelayo ‘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, couldn’t get up, impended by his enormous wings’ (405). This depiction is not really the picture that one would evoke when envisioning an angel descending from the sky.
Marquez gives that idea an unexpected bend, offering rather an angel stuck in the mud. By proposing this elective symbolism of the angels plunge from paradise, Marquez starts to challenge both the characters in the story and the reader to accept that this figure could really be an angel. Be that as it may, he makes accepting significantly this progressively troublesome with his depictions of the man’s physical condition. Marquez describes the man by saying “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 had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud”(405). This old man is a long ways from the normal idea of an angel. By portraying him as ‘a pitiful old man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen'(Marquez 406)
