Name: Gudia, Flory Mae F.

Course & Year: BEED 3A – Day

Subject: GEC-LW Date: 06/10/2022
ACTIVITY: “A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS” BY GABRIEL GARCIA
MARQUEZ
Read the story and answer the following questions.
1. What is the condition of Pelayo and Elisenda on the third day of rain?
Describe it.
Crabs are infesting Pelayo and Elisenda's house and causing a
horrible stench, which is believed to be making their baby sick.
When Pelayo comes back from throwing the crabs into the sea, he
sees a very old man with wings laying face down in mud in his
courtyard. Startled, Pelayo goes to get his wife and they examine
the man. He is dressed in raggedy clothing and is very dirty. After
staring at him for so long, Pelayo and Elisenda are able to
overcome their initial shock of seeing the man with wings. They try
to speak to him but the man speaks in an incomprehensible dialect.
They decide he is a castaway from a shipwreck; however, a
neighbor informs them that the man is an angel.
2. Who does Pelayo find in his courtyard? Describe this creature. Relate him
to their condition.
Pelayo, a poor fisherman, discovers a homeless, disoriented old
man with incredibly huge wings in his courtyard. The old man speaks
in an unfamiliar language. As a result, he and his wife speak with
him in vain. Pelayo and his wife, Elisenda, believe after consulting a
neighbour woman that the old guy must be an angel that
attempted to come to take their sick child to heaven.
3. What does the woman neighbor suggest? What do Pelayo and Elisande
plan to do? What stopped them?
The neighbor woman tells Pelayo that he should club the angel to
death, but Pelayo and Elisenda take pity on their visitor, especially
after their child recovers. Pelayo and Elisenda keep the old man in
their chicken coop, and he soon begins to attract crowds of curious
visitors.
4. How does the whole neighborhood treat or respond to the creature?
Instead of treating the angel with reverence or sympathy, the
townspeople are cruel to him; they keep him in wretched
conditions, hurt him in order to rouse him into more entertaining
 behavior, and exploit his suffering by turning him into a ticketed
spectacle.
5. What does the town priest say about the creature? How does he judge it?
What does it say about Catholicism?
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” functions as a satirical
piece that mocks both the Catholic Church and human nature in
general. García Márquez criticizes the church through Father
Gonzaga’s superiors in Rome, who seem to be in no hurry to
discover the truth about the bedraggled, so-called angel. Instead,
they ask Father Gonzaga to study the old man’s unintelligible
dialect to see whether it has any relation to Aramaic, the language
of Jesus. They also ask Gonzaga to determine how many times the
old man can fit on the head of a pin, another dig at Catholicism
referencing an arcane medieval theory once thought to prove
God’s omnipotence. Their final conclusion that the old man with
wings may in fact be a stranded Norwegian sailor only makes the
church sound absurdly literal-minded and out of touch with even
the most basic elements of reality. In the end, the church’s wait-
and-see tactic pays off when the old man simply flies away—a rib
from García Márquez implying that the “wisdom” of the church has
never really been needed at all.
6. How do the people respond to the priest’s opinion?
From the beginning of the story, the townspeople “other” the angel,
or perceive him as being fundamentally different from them, which
shows their lack of empathy. Pelayo and Elisanda initially believe
that he is a foreign sailor, for example, which (at least in their mind)
justifies Pelayo keeping the angel under armed guard in the filth of
the chicken coop. As the story progresses, the characters’ lack of
empathy leads to outright violence. For instance, the townspeople,
who have flocked to the chicken coop wanting to see something
miraculous, provoke the angel cruelly: they pluck feathers from his
wings, throw stones, and even burn him with an iron in order to
make him do something exciting. This behavior, which would be
obviously abhorrent if done to a human, demonstrates the extent to
which they have othered the angel, and it also shows how group
psychology can normalize behaviors that would usually be
considered immoral.
7. How does the old man change the life of Pelayo and Elisenda? Does it
also change the way they treat the creature? Explain.
 The old man’s presence brought wealth to Pelayo and his family,
and might have helped heal the youngest child of the family. They
were able to quit their jobs and build a bigger home to live in,
treating the old man like an annoying pet who eventually flies
away. He was never appreciated, but used and manipulated to
benefit Pelayo and his family.
8. Compare and spider woman and the winged old man. Who is preferred
by the people? What does this preference say about human nature?
The old man isn’t actively pretending to be an angel, but due to his
wings, he is certainly believed to be one by many. The spider
woman on the other hand, is a fraud, a charlatan, a confident
trickster. Wherein the spider woman has a simple tale to tell of family
tragedy, and because the townspeople recognize themselves in
her more than in the angel, she becomes by far the more popular
attraction in town.
The townspeople prefer the “human truth” and the “fearful lesson.”
This indicates that they want a straight-forward message and would
rather be ruled by fear than to interpret ideas.
9. Does the way the old man is treated say something about how our
society treats the supernatural, the old and the weak? Elaborate your
answers.
The two major supernatural occurrences in the story are the old
man with wings and the girl who has been turned into a spider. The
people in the story treat the old man as an oddity, but not as a
supernatural oddity: more a freak of nature than something beyond
nature. The old man appears to be nothing more than a frail human
with wings, and so his status as an angel is endlessly debated.
Father Gonzaga thinks that he cannot be an angel because he
lacks dignity and splendor. This begs the question of whether the
angel lacks dignity intrinsically, or whether he lacks dignity because
of the way he is treated - cooped up in a chicken cage. Perhaps it
is the people who lack dignity, not the old man. The old man's other
supernatural characteristic - his incredible patience in the face of
his treatment - does not make much of an impression on the
majority of the people, who are happy to exploit him until bored
with him.
10. Do you think the actions of the people will be different if a baby angel or
a beautiful lady angel crash-landed instead of an old man? Explain.
Angels are commonly thought of to be elegant, beautiful creatures
usually wearing white with a spiritual presence, not disease infested
 beings who wallow in their own filth. This allegory makes you
question your own perception of what angels look like. We do not
know for sure that all angles are not old men with few teeth who
reek of squalor. We do not have any tried and true methods of
determining the validity of an angel. The priest tested the man by
speaking to him in Latin, the language of God, and by looking for a
navel or a miracle. Even though the “angel” did not pass any of
the tests, the people in the story believe that the old man must be a
celestial being because there are no other feasible possibilities to his
identity. The author stresses the fact that humans thought this man
with wings was an odd creature that should be on display for the
world to see and abuse like a caged animal. Human ignorance
causes uncivilized behavior. Many people would be reluctant to
place a being that fit into our definition of an angel into a chicken
coop. If this in all actuality had been a real angel, then the
townsfolk approached the situation inappropriately. Another
important point that this story addresses is how we treat other
people, especially those who are different from us. This
demonstrates just how ignorant and cruel some people can be.
When the old man was first seen, Peyalo ran away from the man,
leaving him lying in the mud instead of helping him. Not a one
cared where he came from or why he was there for any other
reason than to acquire money off of him. When the wise neighbor,
priest, and church hierarchy were unable to classify what this man
was, they disregard him.
11. Will the result be different if the old creature landed in your backyard?
Explain.
If the old creature would have landed in our backyard, I would
probably be shocked at first at his sudden appearance but I
wouldn’t resort to such cruel things that the people did to him in the
story.
12. What makes this story different from the other stories you have read?
García Márquez’s literary reputation is inseparable from the term
magical realism, a phrase that literary critics coined to describe the
distinctive blend of fantasy and realism in his and many other Latin
American authors’ work. Magical-realist fiction consists of mostly
true-to-life narrative punctuated by moments of whimsical, often
symbolic, fantasy described in the same matter-of-fact tone.
Magical realism has become such an established form in Latin
America partly because the style is strongly connected to the
 folkloric storytelling that’s still popular in rural communities. The
genre, therefore, attempts to connect two traditions—the “low”
folkloric and the “high” literary—into a seamless whole that
embraces the extremes of Latin American culture. As the worldwide
popularity of García Márquez’s writing testifies, it is a formula that
resonates well with readers around the world. “A Very Old Man with
Enormous Wings” is one of the most well-known examples of the
magical realist style, combining the homely details of Pelayo and
Elisenda’s life with fantastic elements such as a flying man and a
spider woman to create a tone of equal parts local-color story and
fairy tale. From the beginning of the story, García Márquez’s style
comes through in his unusual, almost fairy tale–like description of the
relentless rain: “The world had been sad since Tuesday.” There is a
mingling of the fantastic and ordinary in all the descriptions,
including the swarms of crabs that invade Pelayo and Elisenda’s
home and the muddy sand of the beach that in the rainy grayness
looks “like powdered light.” It is in this strange, highly textured,
dreamlike setting that the old winged man appears, a living myth,
who is nevertheless covered in lice and dressed in rags.
13. What is the humanistic and societal reality implied by the story?
The story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, is social criticism of the human condition. Garcia Marquez
discusses that poverty is a social problem, that affects every aspect
of the culture and society. Poverty is not only the lack of financial
means but also the lack of access to education, therefore creating
ignorance, and the lack of decision-making ability, among the ones
affected. This social condition affects the way a person behaves,
instead of giving respect, love, compassion to the ones in need;
they give and promote the opposite: cruelty, aggression, selfishness
and greed.