In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez shows how humans are always looking for the next interesting thing. When the old man is found, many automatically assume he is an angel. Some people turn to him for miracles, hoping he will heal them, but more interestingly, many people do not seem to care that a holy being has arrived and treat him cruelly. Even Pelayo “did not have the heart to club him to death,” showing that he at least considered it, and later they “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” (218). People came to see him, not as a religious figure, but rather to “[toss] him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal” (219). They did not care about his health or safety, instead viewing him simply as a new form of entertainment.
This is further shown with the arrival of the woman who had been turned into a spider. People immediately became more invested in seeing her than the angel: “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” (222). Despite believing him to be a religious figure, the people are not scared or in awe of him, and instead move on to the next best thing. Even at the end of the story when the angel flies away, Elisenda watches him leave “because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea” (225). The angel goes from being an annoyance to something considered imaginary, something that may never have been there at all, and something that may ultimately be forgotten.
This goes against everything we might expect if people were to find an angel. We would expect people to treat the angel with kindness or reverence, to become more religious. In addition to this, the treatment of the angel in the story makes me curious about its subtitle, “A Tale for Children.” Most children’s stories, especially fairytales, tend to provide some sort of lesson. If this were like most children’s tales, the people who treated the old man like a circus animal would have gotten some kind of karma, and the story would have ended on a much happier note than Elisenda still thinking of the angel as an annoyance. Perhaps what makes this a tale for children is not the idea that it is a fairytale, but instead the fact that it shows how humans truly behave.
I totally agree with the final line of your post; while I don’t really consider this story to be a children’s story (or at least not one that I would ever show my children), it’s still interesting to think about the lessons young readers could learn from it. Stories are some of the best ways to begin introducing children to certain facts of life, and I would say that this story is a great example of how people (whether good or bad) don’t always end up getting what they deserve.
I agree with your point that people are always looking for the next interesting thing. I think in “A very old Mann with Enormous Wings” it is shown with first the lines trying to go see the winged man and then the courtyard with the man became empty when the women ho was a spider came to the town, as everyone had gone to see her instead of the old man.
The last line of your post really changed my view. How does this story act like a children’s book? ON all fronts originally, it doesn’t. It seems too dark to be for children’s minds. Although, some of the original Disney stories written by The Brothers Grimm were terrifyingly dark. It make you wonder, was it actually written for children, or written because the characters acted like children?
I believe that people were more invested into the spider because she spoke their language. The angel spoke a different dialect, not even the priest who spoke “god’s language” understood it. The spider was able to communicate her story and her story was more involved (once being a human and then transforming into a giant spider). Her story could also be used as a tool for young children to listen to their parents.
The different viewpoints and actions in this story intrigued me. Firstly, Pelayo and Elisenda did not seek a miracle from the old man as their neighbors did. They accepted the fact that he had wings and decided to make money from the old man. All the neighbors were amazed by his wings and begged him for miracles. Secondly, the parish priest did not believe the old man was an angel because he didn’t look like one, he didn’t have the “proud dignity of angels,” the old man looked too human. Whereas the doctor who cared for the old man when he was sick found it very logical that the old man should have wings; he saw them as natural and wondered why no one else had them. Thirdly, the people stopped being interested in the old man because he didn’t do what “angels” ought to do, that is grant miracles. They became enamored of the spider woman because it was more believable for a human to be punished than to become an “angel.” I’m sure there is more than one moral a child could take from this, but children’s stories are also weird and entertaining and remain with you when you grow up. This may also have been a reason Marquez subtitled it “A Tale for Children.”