The story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is full of symbols that carry the real theme of the story.
First, the appearance of the angel was old, with bad smell and parasite grown on the huge buzzard wings. The wings were dirty and half-plucked, and were forever entangled in the mud. The author made the appearance of the angel very unpleasant which makes a contradiction to our prejudice. We all think that angel should be very beautiful and clean, but this angel is just opposite of what we thought.
If the old man was really an angel, this is a test to the villagers complexity of thinking. Though the old man was an angel, the people around him did not treat him as a holy creature. They did not even treat him like a human. Pelayo put him in the chicken coop, which is not a good place to live.
The neighborhood came to see the angel, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire. The people around the angel treat him so bad because they were simple-minded, which was what the author wanted to imply that the people in the world are mostly narrow-minded. We have too many thoughts and values we learnt from the past. These thoughts tell us things should be come out this way or things should behave like this. Father Gonzaga did not believe the old man is an angel because the angel could not speak Latin.
He even reported this angel to the church to get a final verdict from the highest court in church. This was a very stupid thought. First, we do not know what is the language of God, and God does not need language actually. It is just the people in the church make up stories to specify the image of God. They humanized God.
But we all are a kind of creature on earth; we just have higher intelligence than other animals. Other than this, we are just no more than a kind of animal on earth. So we cannot make up anything about God by ourselves. The Christians always like to make a lot of specificity on God or His behavior.
They symbolized Jesus Christ as a human like creature. They believe the stories of Jesus was true solely depends on the Bible. The Bible was written a few thousands years ago, at that time the people were lack of scientific knowledge, they thought many natural phenomenon as Gods miracle. And now the Christians believe it whole-heartedly.
At the time the story happened, there was a court in church that judges everything that related to the church. The church can carry out judgements like legislative agencies. This made the Catholic Church a very bad organization, almost like the Mafia now. Because the church can stop anything that was against the church. The church became a government like organization.
This is not the original purpose of religion. The couple expects the angel would help them on the things they want. They expect he would heal their childs sickness. A lot of people came to the angel and expects he would heal them. But it did not happen.
The angel did not help the people what they expected to be helped. The couple tried to feed the angel with mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. These are examples showing that most of the people in this world have narrow-minded expectation. But the reality does not have to behave like this. After sometime, one day Elisenda said it was awful living in that hell full of angels. It means she started to hate the angel.
This shows that she did not think very deep. She should know that it was because of the angel, they got rich and built a house. One of the wrong thoughts of the couple is charging people admittance fee for seeing the angel. They used the holy creature to make money.
This is a very common problem of the people nowadays. We always try to make money or earn benefits; we absolutely do not do something without any benefits. We never miss a chance to take advantage of anything. After sometime, the towns people started to have interest on spider woman more than the old man. Because they could ask questions to spider woman, unlike the angel where they did not have any communication. This shows the simple mind of towns people.
The reason that the towns people treat the angel so bad because they were not familiar with the angel. As most of us are curious about the things we saw, the towns people lost interest on the angel since they could not know anything from him.Bibliography:
