A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

In the story of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez he writes about a man with wings who appears in a couple’s backyard. The next door neighbor calls this man with wings an angel and so to the town he is now seen as an angel. But he is not the typical image that most people imagine an angel to look like which is how Marquez challenges conventional depictions. “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….his huge buzzard wings, dirty and half plucked, were forever entangled in the mud.” This image of the angel that Marquez gives to us is very different than the typical image people think of.

When I think of an angel it is beautiful, majestic, has white sparking feathers and is young. Instead in the story the angel is old and balding and the wings don’t even sound beautiful but are “buzzard wings…forever entangled in mud.” These two images are total opposites and what Marque wants to show through these differences is society shouldn’t always believe conventional ideas because things can always be different.

Also how the priest sees the angel shows this. Because the angle doesn’t speak Latin, looks too human, and doesn’t “measure up to the proud dignity of angels” the priest believes he is not an angel. But just because thing don’t fit a certain criteria doesn’t mean they are not so. Marquez also show that society follows these conventions so much that we don’t even leave ourselves open to think things could be different. We just automatically see that it’s different and disregard the possibility of it being a truth like what the priest does.

The reason I think Marquez says “A Tale for Children” is because that is the age where we learn these conventions and through this story he is saying there is always the possibility that things can be different so be open to them. There is no set way or answer to anything and if you learn that as a child then you can learn and experience so much more in life.