A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings By Marquez

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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings –Critical Essay With in this essay, I will deal with the literal analysis of the story and the mystical, drawing surrealism in how Marquez draws and engages the reader through imagery, techniques and sounds. The story begins with a strange reference to time as if it was from the book of Genesis. “On the third day of rain,” “The world had been sad since Tuesday,” and other statements which indicate time. The weather and human emotion is described in a way that seems mythic and magical. One top of this, the world behaves strange events seems to foreshadow the eerie arrival of out of this world visitor – the angel. The supernatural setting does not greatly affect people in the story, which I find the beginning less affective and nothing special. However the angel draws awe and confusion. As a reader I gain a sense of curiosity, yet the angel is also very ordinary, excluding the fact that he has angelic wings. The image in the story itself captures the balance of epiphany and cruelty. He is surreal coupling of the hole and the profane, and this trend continues throughout story. Surreal techniques flood the entire the story beyond the imagers. Marquez’s narrative language combines the realistic and the unrealistic. For example, he writes that Pelayo and Elisenda were surprised by the angel’s appearance at first but ‘very soon overcame the surprise and in the end found him familiar.’ Marquez doesn’t provide the reader with the reason why they found him ‘familiar’ so quickly; he just tells us they do. This is a technique familiar in legendary literature such ass the bible, where events seem to happen ‘out of time and without proper explanation. Marquez balances the concerns with the realistic detail and characterisation with a mystical lack of concern for causality and law, touching on both image and language in one story.
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