analysis and interpretation of short fiction

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A Very Enormous Triumph over Singular Alienation

One of the early stages in development of a human being is the acquisition of autonomy . Children reach a stage at which they discover the wonders of their toes and their voices , and they move on to realize at a certain point that refusing to do something a parent or guardian asks is an announcement of (presumed ) power . Once the dust settles from the sometimes painful and always challenging growth

from child to adult the hope is that a fully formed , autonomous person has emerged Recently independent of the family , this new person goes out into the world and is once again faced with the challenge of finding himself Oddly , the new challenge is not to seek autonomy but to blend into the workings of the social structure he finds himself in , and so a slow erosion of self begins to occur this often leads to a lack of freedom and to alienation

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 's A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings ' places the issues of alienation and freedom against a backdrop of religion - as an almost earthly test of mankind and his will . The piece opens with three issues : the rain that was falling had been doing so for three days , and the volume of water had caused flooding a child is very sick and a winged man has been found in the mud (Marquez . Reminiscent of the biblical flooding in the Noah 's Ark story , the helplessness of the old man in the mud and the helplessness of the father of the sick child are set against one another . What can one think about a man with wings but that he is an angel ? Pelayo does not recognize this possibility because the winged creature in the mud is a very old man ' Man 's image of angels does not allow for aging or weakness , and so Pelayo fears what he sees and runs for his wife . Perhaps what Pelayo saw lying in that mud was a reflection of his own helplessness . Having married and produced a child , he finds he is incapable of protecting either from the storm . Like the fallen angel , Pelayo is unable to free himself however , the weight he feels is that of responsibility , not of wings

It takes a neighbor woman who [knows] everything about life and death ' to declare the man an angel and wonder aloud if he had been coming for the child ' This woman goes on to declare the angel so old that the rain knocked him down (Marquez . If an angel - one of God 's chosen ones - can wither away , falling victim to something as benign as rain , and lose any sense of grandeur ' what chance does the average man have to survive on his own in the world ? It seems the angel has paid a heavy price for the freedom to fly around at will that his...