سید شهاب الدین ساداتی

Literary Fiction 

Characters

The Angel: round, static

Pelayo: flat, static

Elisenda: flat, static

The Child: flat, static

Neighbor Woman: flat, static

Father Gonzaga: flat, static

The Spider-Girl: flat, static

Protagonist: the old man/angel

Antagonist: the other characters

Conflicts: mental, emotional, physical

Setting

Time: odd, allegorical: “On the third day of rain,” “The world had been sad since Tuesday,”

Place: unknown village

Point of View: third-person limited

Suspense and Dilemma: ---

Symbols: the old man/angel: supernatural, the spider-girl: corrupted morality

Ending: indeterminate or open ending

Themes

The Folly of Human Reception of the Supernatural

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. Perhaps it is the people who lack dignity, not the old man

The Spider-Girl is a clear contrast with the Old Man. Whereas he is difficult—if not impossible—to interpret, the Spider-Girl delights the people with the clarity of her story. She disobeyed her parents as so was turned into a spider by god. Unlike the Angel, the people do not debate her status as a spider. This tendency of the public to accept supernatural explanations for such simple morality tales but to deny them in the case of complexity and frailty (as exemplified by the old man) may be satirical 

The Similarity of Natural and Supernatural

These comments serve to blur the distinction between the natural and supernatural. Garcia Maquez may be suggesting that such a distinction is unnecessary, or that the people are simply blind to it. Whether it is a failure to impose the boundary or ignore it is a matter of interpretation—and the story, ultimately, invites interpretation more than it invites meaning

What is the definition of true Human

Just as the Old Man is described in terms of his animal characteristics, so too he is described as human. They see the Old Man’s humanity yet don’t feel the need to respond humanely. In contrast there is the Spider-Girl. The narrator notes that the spider girl is a much more appealing attraction because her story is full of human truth. Because her story is simply and straightforwardly moral, she is appealing, whereas the old man—full of mystery and complexity—is unappealing. Garcia Marquez invites us to consider that the truly human qualities in life are the Old Man’s—uncertainty, mystery, strangeness, open-endedness—whereas the trite moralizing of the Spider-Girl is actually far from human experience. It merely consoles the people, whereas the Old Man—by revealing our cruelty—shows them their true nature

Humans Must Interpret Events

The story illustrates the human need to interpret life’s events. The Old Man, an exaggerated dramatization of any strange event, is interpreted in many different ways. Individual characters try to attach meaning to the Old Man, or to reduce his meaning, in terms of their own lives. Thus Garcia Marquez stages the inevitable situatedness of human experience. We see things through our own eyes, and the search for a universally applicable meaning is inevitably doomed

Magical Realism and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” is perhaps the clearest and most famous example of a genre that Garcia Marquez helped to create: magical realism. This style, simply put, combines elements of ordinary life with elements of fantasy and magic. One might say that a work of magical realism treats the magical as ordinary, and thus invites us to consider the ordinary as magical. Despite containing similarities to folk legends and fairy tales, stories adhering to “magic realism” avoid the naive moral judgments found in those folk genres. Instead, magical realism creates a complex and problematic world free of moral lessons or any maxims

Irony of Situation: at the end of the story

the notes about the themes are taken from www.gradesaver.com