In The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an Angel (or a foreign sailor with dirty wings) lands in a poor couple’s back yard. They are puzzled at first, but invite over the neighbors to help them figure out what they are encountering. Soon, they have stuffed the old man into the chicken coop, where the chickens groom his wings and charge admission to see the angel. They do nothing to protect him from the elements or the people they bring in to see him, and throw him scraps to eat.

In the end, when his wings grow in more fully, he stands up and flies away, leaving the family behind him, I think that what the old man stands in for is the most important aspect of this story. It is clear that he represents something, but I see numerous things that could fit what he stands in for. Literature is partially about empathy; learning to appreciate the differences in people and see through another’s eyes.

One interepretation that fits him, I think, is that he could be the representation of how we treat those who are different than ourselves; of another race or gender. In the text, we know that he speaks another language, and when the family hears him, they don’t understand it, but from hearing it, think that maybe he’s not an angel, but a lost foreign sailor. (The neighbor convinces them that he is indeed an angel, but that just goes to show how human he was, and that they recognized that.)

Yet, human or angel, they thought it was okay for them to stuff him in a chicken coop and let people throw things at him. What they did, regardless of the humanity they saw in him, was treated him like he was less than human. An animal. Which is what humans do when they come in contact with the strange. During the pre-civil war era, Americans decided that Africans were not human, (and it is a very very dangerous thing to keep narrowing your view of what a human
is) and thus treated them as beasts of burden. Deciding upon your superiority is very dangerous.

At one point, they said that they didn't have the "heart" to club him to death, as if had they not been so squeamish, that would have been an acceptable, or even the correct, thing to do. This, along with the ending (where the wife felt "relieved ... both for herself and him") where the wife is glad that he is out of her hair, also made me think of the impact of being so selfish that you can only think of yourself as complex and multi-layered, but others, especially those who are unlike yourself, as props, that you an stuff into th chicken coop for your own amusement or personal gain, which, when you think about it, is a very slave-owner mentality.