A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Eng 1B

S. Blake

"A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings"

In the short story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author uses his childhood experiences as a pathway to his tale. While growing up in Aracataca, Columbia with his grandparents as his guardians, Marquez became very well acquainted with his Grandmother's distinctive storytelling. "His grandmother had a unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth" (Ruch). Despite the fact that Marquez's grandfather told him not to listen to his grandmother's stories, Marquez enjoyed them very much; so much that he used her way of storytelling in his own tales later in life. Marquez uses magical realism in his short story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," the main character depicts an old man that some call an angel. His creativity soars throughout the entire story and he shares his imagination of his fantasy creature with us. Marquez's creative writing developed through the influences of his family, magical realism, and experiences from his personal surroundings throughout his life.

As defined by Webster's dictionary, magical realism is a literary style that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction. "He composed the tale between his first two major novels, A Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch. "Very Old Man" is perhaps the clearest and most famous example of a genre that Garcia Marquez helped to create: magical realism. This imaginative style combines realistic, everyday details with elements of fantasy, blurring the reader's usual distinctions between reality and magic (Introduction). "This style, simply put, combines elements of ordinary life with elements of fantasy and magic. One might say that a work of magical realism treats the magical as ordinary - and thus invites us to consider the ordinary as magical" (Tornaritis). This is done seamlessly as Marquez makes us feel like the angel is an ordinary man. In Marquez's story, Elsinda and Pelayo certainly treat him less than ordinary. Along with Elsinda and Pelayo, the townspeople treat him like he is anything less than human. Marquez's genius way of making magic feel real and ordinary is one of the reason's why he helped to create the genre, in addition to making it so popular and brilliant. The main magical creature in this tale is an angel, as the old neighbor woman dubs him. He lands in a mud pile at the home of Pelayo (the husband) and Elsinda (the wife), who just recently became parents to a sickly child. "The neighbor woman, who is thought to know everything about life and death, said that he must've come to take the child, but because of the rain he was knocked down" (#Kirszner 597). Back then "angels were thought to be the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy" (#Kirszner 597). In addition to Marquez's angel, the author utilizes magical realism when he writes about the woman who comes to see the angel who "had been turned into a spider for having disobeyed her parents" (#Kirszner 599). At the end of the story the angel flies away, Marquez makes this feel so common, as if the angel could have driven away, this is his main gift as a writer for this story. It makes it feel like anything can happen. This fun and magical way of writing is what helped Marquez to become a world-renowned writer that everyone loves to read. It is not only his use of magical realism that interests people but his ability to use his upbringing as a resource for his creative writing.

Growing up in Aracataca, Columbia in the 1930's must have been a very interesting place where a young mind could feast upon its surroundings, and feast he did. Marquez uses many of his childhood experiences and college memories as building blocks to his stories. Marquez was born in 1928 to very poor and struggling parents. Fittingly enough in the story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," there was a young child born to very poor and struggling parents by the name of Pelayo and Elsinda (Ruch). Pelayo and Elsinda decided to use this angel as a way to make money. People were so interested in seeing him that Pelayo the angel in a chicken coop and started charging money. Crowds came from many lands, near and far, including a traveling carnival (#Kirszner 598). It was said that Marquez's grandfather took him to the circus every year, which may have lead to the influence of magical realism, or at least to the input of the traveling circus in this story. When Marquez was eight years old, his grandfather died, and his grandmother's increasing blindness lead him to have to live with his parents in Sucre. There, Marquez was sent to school, he was called "the shy boy who wrote enormous poems and drew cartoons"(Ruch). The angel in the story somehow relates to Marquez. The angel never spoke, but it seemed that his enormous wings spoke for him, and in school Marquez was so shy he rarely spoke but his