Gabriel Garcia Marquez-- The Paradox of "An Old, Ugly Angel and a Young, Handsome Dead Man"

            Gabriel Garcia Marquez infiltrates the psyche of readers as well as, practically, most humankind in the two short stories, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.” In the former he draws focus to the confused, and often, preconceived imagination which stumps the mind’s ability to really perceive reality. In the latter he mocks the “overactive” imagination which can create a palpable and most genuine feel of fantasy, leaving one trapped in it.

            Who would imagine that an angel of god could be “old and bald with very few teeth, possessing a pair of dirty half-plucked wings." What’s more, could you imagine that he couldn’t speak latin (“the language of the god”) or that he’d be so decrepit that he looked “much too human?” Likewise, would you imagine that in death, a man could elicit so much heart-felt emotions from a village of strangers that they'd  think him to be a real, everyday-villager who once lived amongst them?” That he would be considered one of the villages’ own and given a name (Esteban) because he was so handsome? That is to say, would you imagine that, through his graceful and good looks, people would have more faith, more belief, in a dead man having lived with them than in an old angel who was living with them and performing miracles before their very eyes? The answer is that people put their faith and hopes in the wrong places. In the story of the dead man people weep and mourn for a man who never did and cannot do a thing for them; they attribute a name to his face and create a tale of his life. Conversely, in the story of the old man we see an abandoned and disdained man, who although is an angel of god, is not thought of so and in fact is received with doubt and skepticism.

            All Marquez wants to say is that faith, which if is something that one holds important, must be practiced in a most sincere way or else one can never truly see the "real" miracles that permeate through it. He demonstrate this by how Pelayo and Elisenda (the host family of the old man) are incapable of realizing that before them is an angel by who’s presence they’ve been made more wealthier and more whole. “The world had been sad since…Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing,” but his presence marked the beginning of the “first sunny days.” Yet sadly, mankind, when confronted with a manifestation of his religious devotion, fails to comprehend the complexities and paradoxes and so choose to see “it depart.”  Marquez is saying that what we do when we see that what we’ve been taught doesn’t fit the mold of the reality of what confronts us is we retreat into the gates of our minds and lock it. But that’s not what we must do. Instead, we have to wrench ourselves from the grip of what has been, for so long, ingrained in the fabric of our minds as the simple, and pure truth. In this way, we analyze everyone and everything as good or bad, harmful or beneficial on purely its intrinsic qualities alone and not by appearances or the derivatives of any other quality that we already harbor.