A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" says a lot about how humans react to those who are weak, dependent, or different. 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” Pelayo and Elisenda's first impression of the old man's wings as filthy limbs of a scavenger rather than the glorious wings of an angel is a good example of how Garcá Márquez grounds even his most fantastic elements in the grunginess of everyday life. The second sentence, in particular, hints at one of the central elements of magical-realist fiction: reawakening readers' sense of wonder at their own world.

A story like "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is meant to serve as a reminder that everyday life is full of surprises. The old man with wings represents how people create information out of thin air when it is not provided immediately “What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have them too.” When both the old man and Pelayo and Elisenda's son get chicken pox, the local doctor takes advantage of the opportunity to examine the "angel" physically. The doctor is astounded that the old man is still alive and that his wings appear so natural on his body. In this passage, Garca Márquez appears to imply that the old man is not at all angelic, though the narrator returns to simply referring to him as "the angel" a few lines later. More importantly, the passage implies that the line we draw between natural and supernatural is arbitrary at