A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings-24

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a 20th-century Latin American author who was awarded the Noble Prize, vastly praised for his work, wrote ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ to depict the religious furuncle and human moral shallowness of that contemporary society. To imprint that he has used two kinds of settings combining the realistic details of Pelayo and Elisenda’s life with fantastic elements such as a flying old man and a cursed spider who has the head of a maid to create a tone of equal parts local yet a-magical supernatural story.

Religious practices: In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, Christianity has been described as a religion that has shown as a hollow set of habits, rather than a genuine moral framework. ‘But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things, there is no law”- Galatians 5:22-23 shows the virtues a Christian should have. What we see, during a hazardous storm, Pelayo finds a weak old lying face down in the mud of his courtyard,’ in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up’ impeded by his enormous wings. An angel falls to earth, and he finds himself among Christians who should be delighted but the picture is quite ironic because traditional angels have wings and they are magnificent creatures with majestic faces who don’t sense sickness and decay and can-do miracles instant according to religion. But here, the angel is aged, vulnerable with dirty and half-plucked buzzard wings. The funny thing is, they find the man quite “familiar” and acknowledge him as an angel but instead of his felicitation, they didn’t even show any sympathy or humanity but rather confined him in a dirty chicken coop. Even Father Gonzaga, the priest, fails to recognize that he is sacred.” Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin”- this line shows the so-called religious phenomena. When he saw that the angel did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers, he stigmatized him as an imposter and suggested that the angel might actually be a “carnival trick” that the devil was using to ‘confuse the unwary. Father Gonzaga’s failure to understand the angel bashes him as a rogue representative of a Church that is overall respectable. When he promises to write to Church officials for a second opinion, their reaction is equally arresting like the letter will go to “his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts”. – This showed furuncle system which had no sense of urgency. They spent them if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian with wings.” Clearly, Church priests and people, instead of being delighted in the appearance of an angel, have found themselves jagged in unfuming questions that have no relation to genuine faith.

Human shallowness: The townspeople all are greedy. Instead of treating him better, the townspeople either want something from him or see him as a curiosity. Pelayo and Elisenda used him as a kind of circus pet to earn money and become rich but didn’t care about him at all. Humans pulled out his feathers to touch their defective parts, even the most merciful threw stones at him, and burned his side with an iron. His hermetic language and tears in his eyes did not make them Human. Elisenda cursed him as if she was in hell surrounded by angels. When he flew away, she was relieved. What they didn’t notice was that the child recovered from his illness, they became rich, etc. These characteristics show how shallow nature humans have.

The previous statements prove that if the heads have maggots, the townspeople will definitely lack humanism.

Zareen Tasnim

Instructor

Daffodil Polytechnic Institute

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