In the short story “The Old Man with Wings” by G. Marquez, it is about an angel - an old grandfather who fell face first into the mud, floundering there, but cannot get up, because his large wings are in the way. “He was dressed like a beggar, his skull was bald, like a knee, his mouth was toothless, like that of a decrepit grandfather, large bird wings, plucked and dirty,” “he spoke an incomprehensible language.” Those. he did not at all respond to the human idea of \u200b\u200bheavenly angels. That's why the residents treated the old man with wings this way - they kept him in a chicken coop, threw food like animals, and poked and prodded him to get a better look. Over time, the owners who found the angel began to have an extraordinary benefit from this - they fenced the yard and let in those who wanted to see the miracle for a fee. They quickly became rich.
Angel also had to endure the cruel undertakings of Pelayo and Elisenda’s son, who grew up and climbed into the chicken coop. He even infected the old man with chickenpox.
When the room where the angel lived was destroyed by time, an old man with wings wandered around the house. He was driven from everywhere, and “Elisenda screamed in despair that this was real torture - to live in this hell, crammed with angels.” The woman sighed with relief “for herself and for him” when she saw the angel flying away.
In this short story, the ordinary, everyday life is intertwined with the fantastic, fictional, and many of the paintings are symbolic and contain deep subtext. The sea symbolizes turbulent and contradictory life. Fresh sea wind - a feeling of freedom, a train to a wide, boundless space. People lost the ability to perceive miracles, beauty, dreams, they focused on the everyday, they wanted to benefit from everything, and therefore they did not perceive the old man with wings as an angel, a heavenly message. Only the doctor “was most surprised by the old man’s wings, which were so natural in this organism, which raised the logical question of why other people don’t have them.” These wings are a symbol of spiritual takeoff. They are a sign that humanity needs to recover morally, spread its wings and rise to spiritual heights.
The image of an angel is the embodiment of beauty, the pursuit of a high ideal. Unfortunately, there is no place for angels in the modern world. People are not able to perceive high, noble truths; they are captives of indifference, self-interest, and calculation. But the author has hope for better things, so the angel does not die, but recovers and flies off to heaven. But will he return? Probably when people become more ideal. And he will look much better, but now he is what these people deserve, he is a reflection of their soul.
A misfortune happened in the family of the fisherman Pelayo and his wife Elisenda: their only child fell ill. One morning, returning from the sea, Pelayo saw an old grandfather with wings in his yard. “He was dressed like a beggar, his skull was bald as a knee, his mouth was toothless, like an old man’s, large bird wings, plucked and dirty, lay in the swamp, and all this together gave him a funny and intricate shape...” The couple dared to turn to old, but he answered them in some incomprehensible language. Then Pelayo and Elisenda called a neighbor, who had seen a lot of strange things in life, and she immediately said that it was an angel who might have flown for the child, but the rain knocked him to the ground.
Soon the whole village learned that there was a living angel in Pelayo's house. Fishing, warned by a neighbor that angels are very dangerous at this time of year, he locked the old man in a wire chicken coop. And when the rain finally subsided, it turned out that the couple’s child had recovered. Pelayo and Elisenda decided that in the morning they would give the angel water and food for three days and release the old man into the open sea. But when they went out into the yard, it turned out that neighbors had gathered near the chicken coop, throwing food through the net to the old ones, like a circus animal.
And everyone thought about what to do with the angel: some suggested appointing him as chairman of the universe, others as a general who would win all wars, and others - with his help, to breed a new kind of winged people.
Father Gonzaga also appeared. He greeted the old man in Latin, but he muttered something in his own language in response. “The priest immediately did not like the fact that the angel did not understand God’s language and did not know how to respect God’s servants. Then Father Gonzaga noticed that the old man was too similar to an earthly man... and nothing in the old man’s pitiful appearance indicated the greatness and dignity of an angel.” Therefore, leaving the hen house, the priest warned the parishioners, saying that wings do not indicate anything, and they are an attribute not only of angels, for the devil also knows how to reincarnate and deceive unwary people. But this speech had no consequences. Soon a lot of people crowded into Pelayo's yard and almost destroyed the house. And then it occurred to Elisendi to take money from everyone who wants to look at the angel - five centavos. People walked and walked, and Pelayo and Elisenda suddenly discovered that “they had already collected a tidy sum; in less than a week they filled all the vessels they had in the house with coppers...”
Pelayo's yard again became deserted, although the owners had nothing to complain about; with the money they received, they rebuilt the house, started a whole rabbit farm, and bought a lot of expensive clothes. But the angel remained in the chicken coop. The child grew up, began to walk, played in the chicken coop, the angel treated her as indifferently as he treated others. “One day, a boy and an angel got chickenpox at the same time. The doctor was called. ... The doctor was more surprised by the old wings, which were so natural in this body, a logical question arose: why don’t other people have them?
A few years later the boy went to school, the new house became old, and the chicken coop completely collapsed, and the angel had nowhere to go. He wandered around the yard and house and disturbed the owners. The angel had grown very old, he could no longer see almost anything, and the feathers were falling out of his wings. The owners were even afraid that the old one would die, but the angel recovered, and he even began to grow long and hard feathers, like old birds. And one morning Elisenda saw that the angel was trying to fly up, and although not immediately, he managed to rise up. Elisenda looked after the angel for a long time, “who finally gathered away from them and flew towards the sea, turning into a small black dot.”
Essay on a story G. Marquez “Old Man with Wings”. It's raining. Pelayo and Elisenda throw out crabs that crawl into the house. The crabs are not magic, but ordinary, and their child’s illness is real, with a high fever. But the angel who ended up in their yard and flounders with huge wings in the mud is already a miracle. And as it turned out, he did not bring disaster at all and did not fly for the child to take him to heaven, but quite the opposite - in the morning the child woke up healthy and cheerful. Maybe thanks to an angel? Or maybe not. Pelayo and Elisenda don’t know this, and they don’t try very hard, since an angel is unnecessary trouble for them. The angel does not understand their language, and his appearance is not at all angelic - some kind of toothless, small old man with a bald head. He has wings, and even the doctor who examined him was amazed: wings grow so organically in his body that the question arises: why don’t they grow in people?
Who is sick - an angel who cannot fly, or these people for whom the circus interest, the desire to have fun, the thirst for enrichment overshadows something higher, greater, more valuable?
Think that Marquez wants to show man’s indifference to everything - he is already accustomed to various miracles, then the angel is just a beast, nothing more.
“... and the Lord God looked at the earth, and behold it was corrupted: for all flesh had corrupted its way on the earth...” God sends a flood to the earth to cleanse the filthy, to destroy evil. Marquez uses the biblical version: it has been raining for three days, and at this time the injured angel appears. If a person stopped and thought, she would understand that this is a sign from God, this is a test sent from heaven to establish a balance between good and evil in order to save people. But not only ordinary people have no respect for the angel; church ministers also do not want to protect the unfortunate old man. For them, wings are not proof of being an angel, but a document, a piece of paper from the Pope himself could decide everything.
Happy spring angel began to gain strength. He is reborn, like the earth, becomes younger, stronger, flies into the sky and leaves those people who could not, did not want to find something in common with him. Elisenda has tears in her eyes, but not because the angel has left them, but because she is cutting onions. Her feelings were not enough even for such a simple human act. Marquez symbolically, through allusions and allegory, shows the nature of modern man, who only wants to gain from everything and does not notice that the extraordinary, the holy, the saving are nearby. This happens very often in life: a person expects something more, dreams of something better, not noticing that this “better” already exists, it just needs to be noticed and accepted. I think everyone should find such a lost angel in their life. Because of my stupidity, I lost a friend, because there were better people nearby. Now I understand my mistakes, and I also sometimes get teary. And they are not at all from onions...
Quite a long time ago that I had forgotten about it, my friend strongly advised me to read Marquez. Fortunately, the story turned out to be quite short and was mastered in one sitting and after reading it was successfully thrown out of my head. But just the other day, when I heard the word “angel,” I immediately remembered this story (after all, our subconscious works in an amazing way). And I decided to read it again, only to look at it not in the literal sense, but exclusively in the symbolic sense.
Maybe I didn’t understand something, but I’ll write a short review about this story, how I managed to see it.
Conventionally, I can divide this story into three parts:
1) Appearance of an angel
2) Life in a chicken coop
3) The angel flies away
The first part talks about miracles. When the angel was found on the shore, he was initially mistaken for a sailor from a shipwrecked ship. The only unusual thing was that it had wings. The rest of the miracle turned out to be quite ordinary:
He was wearing a beggar's robe. A few strands of colorless hair stuck to his bare skull, there were almost no teeth left in his mouth, and there was no grandeur in his entire appearance. Huge hawk wings, half plucked, got stuck in the impassable mud of the yard.
In the same way, miracles come into our lives, under the guise of gray everyday life and in inhospitable attire, you just need to be able to distinguish between them.
For some reason, I directly associate the subsequent events of the story with the church.
The people who found an angel on the shore and locked him in a chicken coop are like those who thought of creating a religion: “We came up with this, and only we can be mediators between people and God!” It’s complete nonsense, of course, about mediation between God and people, but this topic is still being brought up.
In the midst of this pandemonium, from which the earth trembled, Pelayo and Elisenda, although endlessly tired, were happy - in less than a week they filled their mattresses with money, and the line of pilgrims, waiting for their turn to look at the angel, kept stretching, disappearing over the horizon.
Although the priest who arrived on the patio called the angel a minion of Satan himself, who took on an angelic guise in order to mislead mere mortals. Yes, and the angel himself did some pretty strange things, instead of performing miracles:
In addition, the few miracles that people attributed to him betrayed some mental inferiority: a blind old man who came from afar in search of healing did not gain sight, but he grew three new teeth, the paralytic never got back to his feet, but just a little he didn’t win the lottery, and sunflowers sprouted from the leper’s ulcers.
And the final part, in which the angel who fell on the sandy beach gains strength sufficient to leave the house of his exploiters and at the same time benefactors, for me is a symbol of the separation of two people who once loved each other. They were found when they were in a terrible state, but love was able to heal them, and this is what happens in this story.
Angel “I survived this very difficult winter and began to get better with the first sun”, and the owners of the home in which he survived this winter “We used the money to build a spacious two-story house with a balcony and a garden.”
Everyone has made the most of what happened to them, then everyone has their own path, which they need to go through, but alone. A very old man with large wings flies away, and Elisenda follows him while chopping onions in her new home.
This is the kind of symbolism I saw in this work. In general, I liked the story (I even re-read it several times), so I recommend that you do not ignore it, especially since it will not take so much time.
It's damp and gloomy outside. The third rain it rains. Pelayo hits the crabs that crawl into their house with sticks and throws them back into the sea. They live next to the sea. With difficulty, Pelayo saw that someone was moving in the far corner of the patio. Looking closer, he saw an old man with wings. Pelayo and his wife looked at the strange creature in numbness. He was very old and exhausted. Pelayo soon became accustomed to the sight of the creature. The neighbor said that he was an angel, so they did not dare to kill him. And they decided to let him go. The next day the whole village gathered near the chicken coop
with a curiosity. There was also Padre Gonzaga, who convinced that this creature, foul-smelling, exhausted and covered in dirt, was not an angel, but still promised to write a letter to the Vatican, they would sort it out. But the crowd only grew, and even the troops were called to prevent the fence from being broken. The owners decided to take a coin from everyone who wants to look at the angel. There were many pilgrims. The Pelayos stuffed all the mattresses with money. But the angel was unhappy, did not react and tried to hide. Everyone tried to snatch his feather from him, throw a stone, and once they even burned him with a hot piece of iron, which brought tears to his eyes. After that he was not touched. The Vatican sent endless letters with questions and no answers. But one day interest in the angel faded. The circus with the spider woman arrived, and everyone left to look at the new miracle. Pelayo felt deserted, but he didn't complain. With the money they raised, they built a new house and made a number of acquisitions. And the angel lived in a chicken coop, and people only sometimes paid attention to him. Pelayo's child had already started school when the sun and rain completely destroyed the chicken coop. He weakened even more and began to completely bore Pelayo with his presence. But one spring the angel began to get better, he grew new wings. And one morning Elisenda, Pelayo’s wife, saw an angel speeding around the garden, taking off with difficulty and disappearing into the sky. She watched the angel with relief until he disappeared. He was no longer an obstacle in her life, but simply an imaginary point above the sea horizon.
Glossary:
- old man with wings summary
- Old man with wings
- old man with wings read
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