Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

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Decoding the Message: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Brilliant Use of Whimsical Literary Implements in “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” One might think that it would be merely impossible to give someone a piece of information without using dialogue; however, one of the main characters in the tale “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was capable of doing so. The audience would find it easy to be very drawn to what Marquez was writing about. There was an innocent person mistreated because no one knew who or what he was; I saw a victim of bullying. Throughout the story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez finds a way to use detailed imagery, in-depth symbolism, and a whimsical sense of mysticism to relay and message of importance…show more content…
The condition of the wings tell a story, “His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud” (Marquez 218). The old man’s appendages are a representation of himself and all that he has endured. As the story progresses, so does the man. At the close of the story, the audience discovers that his wings have flourished during his stay at the family’s home, “...at the beginning of December, some large stiff feathers began to grow on his wings…” (Marquez 224). For anyone who has fallen victim to any type of bullying can find it easy to pick out the bully, or antagonist, in this story. In this particular case, the townspeople and the family are the antagonist of the story. The old man is taken advantage of by the family after they saw how the townspeople reacted to him, “Elisenda, her back all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel” (Marquez 220). The other antagonist of the story is the townspeople. At first, they react to the old man as if he were a circus animal by “tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire...” Time progresses and the reader discovers a development as to how the townspeople negatively react to the angel, “…the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing” (Marquez 221). The longer the angel was around, the more people wanted to see from
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