A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
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"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (Spanish:Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes) is a fictional short story by author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It falls within the genre of magic realism, and is one of the short stories included in the book Leaf Storm.
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[edit] Plot summary
One day a family in a small village finds an angel, in the form of a dirty old man with large, buzzard-like wings. They put him up in the chicken coop outside of the house, where they charge admission for people to see him. The angel/old man is very self occupied, and when sick people ripped off his feathers hoping to be cured by them odd things happened to them. A traveling circus with a woman who was turned into a spider comes into town, causing the people to lose interest in the angel. The people would rather go to see the spider woman because she is cheaper, answers questions and is social--unlike the angel, who sits still and seldom speaks. Eventually the chicken coop breaks and the angel comes to live in and around the house, and is constantly shooed out by the mother of the family, who feels like "it was awful living in the hell full of angels" (refering to his ability to move from place to place quickly). The angel is eventually given a shed to live in. He sits alone in the yard and, after a long time, begins to grow new "scarecrow" wings. He finally flies off into the distance as the family, relieved that he had gone, resumed their daily lives.
[edit] References in other works
- The Simpsons episode "Lisa the Skeptic" shares the plot element of an angel that appears (although it is supposedly dead) and is put on display by a character for paying visitors.
[edit] Theme
The theme of this story is that humans are passive and show no respect in the way that they treat the angel.
[edit] External links
| The Work of Gabriel García Márquez | |
|---|---|
| Novels The Evil Hour, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in His Labyrinth, Of Love and Other Demons | |
| Short Stories: Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, Big Mama's Funeral, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother, Strange Pilgrims, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, For The Sake of A Country Within Reach Of The Children, Memories of My Melancholy Whores | |
| Non-Fiction The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Clandestine in Chile:The Adventures of Miguel Littin, News of a Kidnapping, Living to Tell the Tale | |
