Jordan Liu

James Hong

August 28, 2013

Does ritual and superstition play a role in the story A very Old Man with Enormous Wings?

Disguss

The story A very Old Man with Enormous Wings is about a couple, Pelayo and Elisenda

found an old sickly man with huge wings on the shore. The couple tried to communicate with the

old man but his incomprehensible language makes them confuse and believe he is a castaway.

A neighbour woman told them that he is an angel which leads a local priest, Father Gonazga,

visit the house to see the old man and determine whether or not he is an angel. Ultimately,

Father Gonzaga thinks the old man is not an angel. After a while, the angel’s health has been

decline, and it seems he is on the edge of death. When the winter is over, the old man suddenly

becomes a lot healthier and grows a few new feathers, he then start roaming around the house,

but Elisenda keeps shooing him out of the room with a broom. Eventually, he left the house and

begins to fly away. During the story, ritual and superstition play a major character in the story in

three ways; people are asking for help, they treat the old man differently than others and they

celebrated due to the arrival of the “angle”.

People in the town where Pelayo and Elisenda lives in are superstitious which becomes

a major role in the story because superstition made the people from the town gathering in front

of Pelayo and Elisenda’s house, and most of them are invalids. From the quote of the story,

“With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high

netting so that crab wouldn’t get in during the winter.”(Marquez ,4) We can tell with the amount

of money the couple earned by charging five cent each person admission to see the angle, they

can even built a new mansion which tells us the number of people that are superstitious to

paying to see the angel and the numbers of people asking for help on sicknesses are extremely

high.

Due to the superstition, people think the creature with humanity looks and wing are

called “angles” which is one of the gods with wings who can heal any diseases according to the

Holy Bible which cause a group of invalids are asking for help. They also tried to make him eat

mothballs, which, according to the superstitiously neighbour woman, it is the food prescribed for

angels. The superstition created by Holy Bible also makes Father Gonzaga, the priest sent by

the courts thinks the old man is not an angel due to his unbearable smell and his wings was

strewn with parasites and his feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial wings does not fit the

image of an angel.

The superstition of the people made many other carnival attractions arrived in the town

for the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed

her parent. People are celebrating for the arrival of the angel which had never happened before.

The movement is a ritual which plays a major role of the story.

Superstition and Ritual plays a major role in the story by making people come to see the

angel and ask for help for the sicknesses, Feeding the angel according to the Holy Bible and

Celebrating for the arrival of the angel. Although the old man is not an angel, the superstition

made the people in the town thinks he is. Eventually, the old man left the town and he did not

heal any invalids back to normal. The story tells us that we don’t need to be true to who you are

in a superstition to accomplish the miracle.

Work Cited

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. A very old man with enormous wings. United State of America:

GradeSaver LLC, 2006. Print.