The Handsomest Drowned Man With Enormous Wings Magical Realism

“The blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers…when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely.” This is a quote from Garcia Marquez’s story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. It is an example of magical realism because the angel in this story is first believed to have magical powers that can heal people and once they come to realize that he does not, they replace him with a spider lady who is better in many ways than one. This cannot be real because angels, though religiously accurate, cannot be humans or grant wishes, nor can a human turn into a large spider who can speak.

He was so large, heavy, and handsome that nothing in the village was made for him. “They could not find a bed in the village large enough to lay him on nor was there a table solid enough to use for his wake.” This quote illustrates that Esteban was herolike and a saint, so they began to worship him. In reality, Esteban could not be that big, and the exaggeration in his characteristic made him seem alive and important. They used religion to make it seem like he was important, but he was just a dead stranger, not a saint. “But they also knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban's memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams…because they were going to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban's memory eternal” In the end, they still did not admit that Esteban was dead or that he was just a stranger. They changed their whole village to keep his memory alive, and it was a beneficial change because now the people were happier, the village was improved and brighter, and the people had something to live for because they were proud of being “Esteban’s village”. What the readers can take away from this is that an important figure can encourage change, even when not

At first people paid to see him and began to worship him, but then they realized that “nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels.” because “he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers” and he wasn’t anything special. A new figure showed up, it was a lady who had changed to a large spider when she was young, “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.” She could speak the language of the villagers and was a better version of the old angel. The angel represents the Catholic Church and the spider represents a new branch of Christianity that is better aligned with the needs and wants of the people. Everybody forgot about the angel and he eventually left. “He was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.” This quote at the end illustrates how the only thing holding the angel back from leaving was the faith of the people, but once they let go of the old and followed the new, the angel was forgotten and left. The villagers finally realized that the angel wasn’t going to change and in order for anything