Essay About Old Man And Good Morning

Ralph
Ralph
Angel
In the story “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel
Garcia Marquez a man named Pelayo is taking crabs to throw into the sea
when returning he finds a man with wings. He then runs to tell his wife of this
and in turn they both tell their neighbor who “knew everything about life and
death”(Marquez 84). It was not until the neighbor came that the thought of
this man being an angel was even introduced into the story. The thought that
this thing was an angel is inconclusive since the only evidence given for this
conclusion is that it had wings. The fact of whether or not this creature is an
angel is never really stated in the story. From what I gathered from the text I
am not sure myself. The part that makes this so hard to believe that this is
an angel is that it has no real reason to be there. The only information added
in to the story that comes even close to being a viable reason for this to be
an “angel” is that the child of Pelayo is sick and so they think that he is there
to take the child from them. When the three had come to the conclusion that
he was an angel of death their first reaction was to kill the man. This can be
thought of as societys usual impulse of automatically wanting to destroy the
strange or unfamiliar instead of trying to learn from it. Luckily for the man,
Pelayo can not bring himself to kill him, this inability to kill the man leads me
to believe that Pelayo is the representation of kindness and compassion in
this story. This compassion is seen again later when he allows the old man to
live in their shed even after he had stopped bringing in money for the family.
Pelayo locking the man in the chicken coop is the major problematic
point in the story, it sets up all of the events that happens to the family and
the man after the initial meeting. After the “angel” is locked up word of him
spreads like wild fire and soon everyone in town was coming to see the man.
This flocking of people coming to see the man included Father Gonzaga the
local priest. When Father Gonzaga arrived he enters the chicken coop in
order to examine the specimen more closely. As he entered the coop he said
good morning to the angel in “Latin, the language of God,”(Marquez 86)
when the angel made no response is when the first suspicions that he really
was not an angel but merle some strange man were brought into play. The
story then presents more evidence to this fact in that the angel has too many
humanlike qualities such as an unbearable smell of the out doors and he was
also covered in parasites.
On the other hand this is also the point in the story where I feel that
the strongest argument for the creature being an angel can be made. Though
it is not as an angel of death but as a guardian angel because it says almost
immediately after he is locked up that the boy recovers from his ailment. Then
later when the family makes money off of people coming to see the angel this
is something that helps the family by making them able to buy netting and
keep out the crabs. This was truly a blessing for them because in the text it is
said that the smell of all the dead crabs is what is thought to be the cause of
the childs fever in the beginning.
The next thing that came to me as