43 pages • 1 hour read
Gabriel García MárquezA Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
The Very Old Man, or the Angel
Although the story revolves around and is titled after him, the very old man is never named and never speaks clearly to the other characters. He is treated like a circus animal, speaks and sings to himself in an unknown language, and only reacts to others when they inflict pain on him. His true identity is therefore ambiguous, and both García Márquez’s depiction and the villagers’ opinion of him oscillate; sometimes he is a poor old man, and sometimes he is a mysterious, “haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals” (Paragraph 10). Instead of an autonomous character, the old man acts as a reflection of others’ beliefs and goals—in particular, whatever “miracles” they think they can get out of him. He thus becomes a vessel for showing the darker side of human nature, which captures and exploits the things we find strange; just as the old man provides entertainment to the story‘s characters, he serves as a narrative and philosophical tool for the author himself.
This perhaps explains the story’s ending, which finally gives the old man enough freedom to recover and make his own decisions—although only after the crowd has finished with him and moved on to a new curiosity. Furthermore, the man retains power in the form of knowledge. The story’s audience never discovers if the old man is truly an angel, where he came from, or where he is going, but that is the point; he alone possesses this knowledge, and neither the villagers nor the story’s readers can use it to exploit him further.
Pelayo and Elisenda
Pelayo and Elisenda are a married couple and the first characters we meet. Initially, they are down on their luck. Crabs have washed up and infested their home during a brutal storm that has lasted for days, and their newborn baby is ill. When they find the old man collapsed in their yard, their weak-willed and opportunistic nature becomes clear; their neighbor easily persuades them that the man is an angel, and they realize they can make money by charging people to see him. Even though they don’t kill the man as the neighbor suggests, they feed him scraps, keep him locked in a filthy cage, and allow people to torture him for fun. When he flies away, Elisenda only feels relieved to be free of an “annoyance” (Paragraph 13).
Ultimately, Pelayo and Elisenda represent the consistent human desire for success at any cost. They are not clear villains; their dehumanization of the old man makes it easier to exploit him and not see anything wrong with it, and they have strong incentives—poverty and the fear of their son’s imminent death—to do so. They also didn’t choose to be responsible for a sickly old man with wings. However, even after their son’s health improves and they become wealthy, they remain ungrateful to the angel and continue treating him like a neglected animal. They have apparently not learned from the experience, so the new money only highlights their callousness. By not characterizing Pelayo and Elisenda as clearly evil, the text makes them realistic representations of humanity’s capacity for casual cruelty.
Father Gonzaga
Of the many people who come to see the angel, Father Gonzaga is the only named character, which signals his importance to the story’s meaning. Although he is a priest and a man of faith, he uses logic to try to prove that the old man is not an angel; he tests the old man’s knowledge of Latin and the proper greeting for religious leaders, and he decides the old man does not embody “the proud dignity of angels” (Paragraph 5). He warns the townspeople not to get carried away by superstition, and as he awaits news from Rome, he distracts them with “formulas of maidservant inspiration” (Paragraph 9).
Thus, Gonzaga embodies the contradiction between faith and reason. Whereas faith requires belief without evidence, his behavior suggests he values conclusions backed by evidence. However, because the story is primarily intended for children, the seriousness of Gonzaga’s character and the implications of his contradictory personality only enhance the story’s humor. Amidst the chaos that the angel awakens in the community, Gonzaga’s desire for order and structure is comical, and suggests he takes his job too seriously. Therefore, Gonzaga allows both children and adults to laugh at and critique the “seriousness” of the Church.
Related Titles
By Gabriel García Márquez
