A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings Analysis

Eli Peterson

Professor Jones

ENGL 1020 SH2

03 April 17

The Compassion of a Heaven-Sent

        The unjust treatment of people that are different has been around for centuries and will continue to hang over people that can relate to not fitting in. Being different from one another is common in human nature and cannot be avoided, but the mistreatment of minorities is a real problem in the world. Many minorities would agree that maltreatment has not stopped and will always be around even if it is not blatantly said to them. Gabriel García Márquez’s story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is prime example of how those who are lower class, dependent, or different are victimized even when they are compassionate towards all others.

        In Márquez’s story the father, Pelayo, finds an old senile man that speaks in incomprehensible tongue, but this old man has enormous wings on his back which Pelayo finds odd and assumes he is an angel sent to take his ill stricken son. This character plays an important role to what Márquez makes out to be an angel which directly relates to writing in The Bible, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” (Hebrews 13:2) At first the parents, Pelayo and Elisenda, want to send him away on a raft with three days of provisions. This seems to be filled with ill intent towards the man but it is better than the original plan of clubbing him to death and putting him out of his misery. The parents end up taking pity on the man when their son goes through a drastic recovery and they decide to assist the heaven-sent till they figure out more information on the old man. The parents are not very considerate people. They feel sorry for the old man but see him as more of a hindrance to their life even though he may have helped with their son’s recovery. They end up locking him up in a chicken coop which eventually attracts many visitors to see this mysterious man with wings. As more and more people come Elisenda begins to charge the wonderers a fee to see the man. The man gives no attention to the crowd; he ignores them and stays to his own even when the crowd tries to upset him by throwing stones and ruffling his wings, but the man stays calm and takes the unwanted attention. The old man’s day-to-day presence is depressing and seen by the reader as minimal suffering which is proved by Márquez words stating, “He was lying in a corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him.” (Márquez 2) The crowd, sooner or later, gets bored with the still sitting man and demanded to be entertained so they burn his side with a branding iron to arouse him and in the words of Márquez, “He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.” (Márquez 3) Even after the crowd manages to anger the heaven-sent, he still remains calm after his rush of pain due to his kind nature and enduring compassion. Márquez put this in his story to show that even as the minority, old man with wings, is inflicted with pain he still does not lash out on the common folk. This shows the true compassion that the old man contains toward the family that did very little for him and continue to exploit him for his uniqueness/differences. As the crowd dissipates due to another miracle specimen arrives in town the man is left outside as the family upgrades their house from the large amount of money earned from the old man. He eventually becomes more of a member of the family as years go by, and when the chicken coop finally flops he moves to a shed neighboring his old home. By this time he is able to move freely around an often finds himself wondering around the house, from room to room which annoys the ungrateful parents who have still not realized what all the old man has done for them by changing  their lives. The family treats the man like an unwanted pet even though he brings nothing but kindheartedness and prosperity to them.

        The old man did not have a nice, luxurious time while visiting the family he was sent to help. Márquez making the old man represent an angel sent from above to look out for the family in need emphasizes the sacrifice made by the man to repair the families troubles. In a scientific study written by Jamie Mayerfeld he compares the overall quality of life to that of a scale. He states “I propose that all conscious experience can be classified as belonging to happiness, or suffering, or something in between. We may think of a one-dimensional scale with increasing happiness pointing in one direction and increasing suffering pointing in another direction, separated by an intermediate zone that includes feeling neither good nor bad overall and the kind of slightly disagreeable feeling that falls short of suffering. At any moment of a person's conscious life, the quality of his or her overall feeling can be located, in principle, somewhere on the scale.” (Mayerfeld 29) meaning that one could put an exact point on their quality of life. In this case, the angel’s quality of life is low and is suffering from his existing conditions (Lack of flight, overall health, unable to communicate, and unwanted attention from humans) and it continues to move toward the “suffering” side of the scale while the family’s moves the way of “Happiness” . Although his life quality, at this time, is low, he still assists the family in their troubles while completely disregarding his own. The angel is willing to make sacrifices for the family while they show nothing but minor sympathy to him much like that of a religious idol. In a book written by Lauren Berlant she writes, “The phrase “the compassionate one,” indeed, invokes one of the most familiar uses of this notion, the idea that compassion is one of the attributes of God (e.g., from the apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus 30:33: “For the Lord is full of compassion and mercy, long-suffering and very pitiful”).” (Berlant 20) This line, “compassion is one of the attributes of god”, proves why the old man stayed around for so long with the unappreciative family. The angel is so filled with the compassion to help them that he cannot see their ungratefulness. He is only there to help them in their time in need and will do what needs to be done to help them. The old man always put the family in front of himself even if he never felt valued. Eventually the man regrows his strength enough to fly away leaving the family without a good bye as Elisenda watches regrets nothing and is happy the annoyance is nothing more than a dot in the sky.