Essay Analysis. M. G. Garcia. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Student Name
Course
Instructor
Date
Essay Analysis
In Gregory Rabassa’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World, the main characters are treated differently. In Rabassa’s story, the living visitor is tortured and locked by the villagers. However, in Marquez's story, villagers celebrate the corpse of a dead man who is washed ashore.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Pelayo discovers a homeless and disoriented old man in the backyard. The old man has wings, is filthy and speaks in an intelligible language. Pelayo concludes that the man is an angel, who must have come to take his sick child to heaven (Marquez). While a neighbor advises Pelayo and his wife to kill the angel, they take pity on the visitor, particularly when the child eventually recovers. Pelayo locks the old man in a chicken coop, where he soon begins to attract the attention of curious visitors. As the crowds continue growing, the old man ignores them. Some people in the crowd begin to pluck his feathers and throw stones at him so that he can stand up. They even go ahead to sear the old man with a branding iron to determine whether he is still alive. With time however, the crowds begin to disperse when a “spider woman” arrives in the village (Marquez). The woman had been transformed into a giant tarantula containing the head of a woman for disobeying her parents. Due to the popularity of the spider woman, individuals quickly forget about the old man with wings.
In The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, villagers discover a corpse washed up on a beach. While no one is in a position to identify the man, the villagers imagine the kind of a person he might have been. They decide to hold a ceremony to celebrate the life he lived. As the villagers continue with the planning, the story regarding the man’s identity becomes more complex. When the women wash his face, they discover that he is extremely handsome. The corpse cannot fit their normal clothes, hence the women have to dress him in custom-made clothes to maintain his dignity. The man cannot also fit their houses and they lament that their houses are too small for him. The crowds decide that the man should not be buried without a family. They hence select among themselves people to be the man’s family. They give the man a dignified burial by sending him over a cliff without weights, thinking that he might one day come back to the village.
On the one hand, the villagers do not consider the old man with wings to be important and hence they mistreat him. At first, seeing a being with wings convinces the villagers that the man must be an angle. However, his actions do not fit those of an angel. The villagers have higher expectations of how an angel should behave and the old man with wings does not fit that description. The true nature of the man becomes apparent when the priest expresses his suspicion. The priest, on examining the old man concludes that the creature with the wings is most likely an imposter. When the pries...