“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” June 24, 2008
Posted by eng161 in Common Room.Tags: A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, irony, narrator, symbolism, tone, voice
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One of the hallmarks of Marquez’s writing style is the tone of the narrator’s voice. Every story we read is told by a narrator that chooses a perspective (first person versus third person [limited or omniscient]). In this case, the narrator chooses third person omniscient. But, the striking thing is the very deadpan nature of the narrator’s voice in Marquez’s stories. His narrator’s are almost always very emotionally detached. The magical and fantastic is described alongside the very real and mundane with the exact same tone and conviction. Nothing about the narrator’s description hints at the extraordinary nature of some of the details.
This is one form of irony that we need to explore to figure out what Marquez is trying to get us to understand. Pick a passage consisting of no more than a few sentences (3 to 5) where the narrator describes both simple daily life in the village and something that seems really extraordinary. By juxtaposing these ideas, what does Marquez want us to understand about the situation, the characters, or even the way we understand the world?
“Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas.”
The juxtaposition of theses events leads us to believe these people are not elated with the appearance of an angel, but burdened with the arrival of a freak. Pelayo and Elisenda are not convinced that he is truely an angel. They, for the most part, do not think of an angel as that of what is portrayed in the chicken coop. A mixture of misperception, disbelief, and cruel human nature make these characters evil themselves. The author is trying to tell us that our taught perceptions may not coincide with the truth. He also wants us to learn that there is a darker side to humans, that which can find fault in almost anything and exploit it without thought.
“Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of of angels.” (pg.328-329)
The jutxaposition in the passage of the story is the fact that when the priest is shocked by how the angel doesn’t know the language of God, when in fact the priest had the language of God incorrect. The priest says “good morning” in Latin, when Hebrew is the language of the Bible. The fact that the priest and the townspeople still see the old man as a freak instead of an angel is also juxtaposition. They try to find every excuse in the book about why he can’t be an angel instead of why he is an angel; I mean, he has wings! Regardless if the feathers are tattered or have parasites, they’re still wings!
The tone that the author is trying to set is of mystery and think outside of the box. The perception of the angel is one of mystery and of the unknown. That is why I think that the town’s people where so interested in him, but also afraid of what the man would really do.
“arrived into town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask questions and study her…
the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely.”(pg 330-331)
The juxtaposition is that the spider gathered so much interest because she was less expensive to see and she could be asked questions and examined up and down, resulting in the crowd quickly losing interest in the angel and left as fast as they had arrived. It kinda goes to show that your moment in the spotlight can be very short lived, and that there is always someone or something better than you.
“He 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, impeded by his enormous wings” (p. 327).
It is ironic that the author used more words to describe the angel’s age than his wings. One thing we can glean from these lines of text is that people lose their since of imagination as they advance in age and they become blind to the real grandeur of things.
The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rottend shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He 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, impeded by his enourmous wings. (pg. 327)
I totally agree with Derek on the fact of the author taking more time to describe the angel’s age and appearance than he is to actually describe the angel. It does seem to show that as people get older they tend to lose their sense of imagination. I also noticed that the author describes the dreariness of the day much more beautifully than he does the fact that there is an angel in this guy’s backyard. Marquez seems to be showing us that if we can take something so human and mundane such as a rainy day and turn it into something amazing and/or fantastical, then why is it so hard to believe that something that is supposed to be amazing and/or fantastical can look so human and mundane.