A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Linda Eckert
English 205
Professor McDonald
October 10, 2007
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
I chose to write about the story of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” because I found it to be the most interesting of all three.   I also found that it is the most intriguing because we have no idea what he is and we never figure it out.   I kept reading it thinking by the end of it we would know what it was and we never found out.   There is a lot to be figured out in this story and surprisingly, at the same time, it is all laid right in front of us.
To begin with, I came to the conclusion that this old man is not an angel fallen from heaven.   I think he is nothing more than a very old man who had grown wings in some odd and inexplicable manner.   Thus thinking about the reason why he had wings is what made me confused.   There is nothing that I can come up with that would make sense as to why this old man has wings and more importantly, why does he come to the backyard of Pelayo’s family.   I began to think that maybe the fact that he had wings was because he had wanted to fly one day and had asked God for them, after all, this is a fictional story.   Then after I read about the lady who became a spider, I thought maybe he received the wings as a form of punishment.   In the end, I could not figure it out.
Angels are usually thought to be elegant, beautiful people, normally wearing white and with a spiritual presence, not disease infested very old men that wallow in their own filth.  This metaphor makes you question your own opinion of what angels look like.  We do not have any tried and true methods of shaping the legitimacy of an angel.  The Father tested the man by speaking to him in Latin, the language of God, and by looking for a belly button or for him to perform a miracle but unfortunately, nothing worked.  And even so, the townspeople still believe that the old man is an angel because there are no other reasonable possibilities as to what he is.  The...