In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is debating about whether a man with wings in an angel or not. This story is magical realism since it deals with the concept of angels, spider girls, and miracles. Since those things are not possible, it gives the story a magical setting.
The old man with wings is an angel, even if he’s not beautiful, clean, and pure. He is described as an old, dirty man with bird like wings and that is not the characteristics of an angel. The angel use to pick dirt, fruit peels and garbage out of his wings, so he tried to stay clean but he was put in a chicken coop. “The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God,” the priest didn’t of the angel because he did not speak Latin, which is God’s language. Language is a way of expressing yourself and the angel could not do that because he had a different didactic. So the priest did not believe he was an angel, and more like a man with wings. “He had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds,” meaning he was just an regular old man but he had wings because he smells just any man would and he was beaten up by the winds. The parasites suggest that he was too clean and angels are the purest white.
The old man with wings is an angel, “A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat.” Since the angel came to their house the bad didn’t have his fever anymore and was health. The angel seemed to be immortal, “he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days.” That he did not die even after the worst winter came, even though his was in a chicken’s coop where it can get old. The miracles of the angel were: as a blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, a leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers, and a paralytic who almost won the lottery. So the people lost their faith in him really being an angel because of his pity miracles. It’s up for debate, whether the old man with wings was an angel or not.
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You make accurate arguments for the old man either being an angel or not being an angel. One can also look at the story as a challenging of the conventional image and the Catholic image of an angel. I did some research on Marquez, the author, and I found that he was raised in a liberal family that challenged the authority of those in power in Colombia. It is possible that they (or Marquez himself- he analyzed the causes of violence in Latin America) also opposed the Catholic Church's strict control over social services in Colombia. If this is the case, Marquez may be trying to challenge the Church's authority through his description of clergy members who cannot recognize an angel (if Marquez means for the old man to be an angel) just because he is outside of their expectations.
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