I have provided all 3 essays. You are evaluating the three literary…
Question Answered step-by-step I have provided all 3 essays. You are evaluating the three literary… I have provided all 3 essays. You are evaluating the three literary analysis essays provided by your instructor. You are to write an EVALUATION ESSAY to answer these questions: (1) who wrote the strongest (and the next strongest, and the least strong) literary analysis essay and (2) why.Set forth a thesis in which you argue for the ranking of the critical essays that you have decided upon. You will need to explain the effectiveness of each of these three analysis essays using the standards of literary analysis as explained in lectures and as discussed in this course. Be sure to develop your argument for the rank order of the essays by providing specific evidence from the essays to support your points. Remember, the focus for your essay is to be on the effectiveness of the three analysis essays, not on your own analysis of Gabriel García Márquez’s story. Do not devote space in your essay to comments about proofreading since all have been edited for basic correctness. Tracy MillerProfessor DiazENG 102 0082 August 2011Interpreting the Central Symbol in Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Gabriel García Márquez labels his short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” as ” A Tale for Children,” tempting readers to expect the story to be a simple tale, perhaps with an explicit moral for its theme. In fact, the story is not a simple tale with an easily understood meaning. Biographer and critic Gene H. Bell-Villada observes that “what fairy-tale characteristics [the story] has are affectionately parodied throughout” (136). Critic Ronald McFarland comments that the “elements of the fabulous” such as the winged old man, who is the central symbol of the story, “may cause readers to think in terms of symbolic narrative, parable, and allegory” (551). If the tale is allegorical, such as a commentary on the history of García Márquez’s native Colombia, for example, that meaning would be lost on children. By giving his story such a label, García Márquez is simply preparing readers to accept the unrealistic elements of story with the open-mindedness of children listening to fairy tales. With such an open mind, readers are prepared to become members of the community into which the winged old man has dropped. Biographer Raymond Williams notes that García Márquez often in his fiction employs “the entrance of an element foreign to society which interrupts its regular sense of order,” providing “García Márquez “with his point of departure” (50). The community members do not question that this unrealistic creature is in their midst; they simply try to figure out what the creature is and what to do with him. Their human reactions of fear, reason, religious faith, compassion, opportunism, and annoyance shape their responses to this unlikely event, and through their reactions, García Márquez reveals the limitations of human perception. Therefore, interpreting the central symbol of the story is the task of García Márquez’s readers just as it is the task of his characters. Unable to do that task, readers are forced to understand the limits of their ability to interpret any unusual narrative or event just as the community members in the story are unable to agree on what the creature is and what to do with him.For example, for the children watching Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the challenge is not to figureout why an evil character like Maleficent would curse a baby to die on her sixteenth birthday by pricking her finger on a spindle of a spinning wheel but, instead, to figure out how the parents of the baby, Princess Aurora, might stop the curse from playing out in her life. Children would not question that the good fairy Merryweather cannot undo an evil curse with her blessing for the child. Children delight in seeing the curse unfold as the evil character predicted while still being thwarted by the good fairies. García Márquez wants readers of his story to have the imaginative capacity of the children who enjoy the Disney movies yet the understanding of adults who see the humor he pokes at our human limits of perception. McFarland explains that readers of the story are urged “to play the same interpretative games that are indulged by the communities” in the story (551).The first human reaction to the unknown is fear. Upon seeing the creature, Pelayo was “frightened by that nightmare” and seeks the company of his wife Elisenda to get her reaction; they stare “with mute stupor” (García Márquez 410). After a long look, fear subsides, and they “in the end found him familiar” (García Márquez 411). This reaction is similar to reading a difficult piece of fiction. Readers at first fear the difficulty of making meaning from the unknown, but they gain familiarity through repeated reading of the narrative. Changing perceptions is a normal course of human behavior. Once more familiar with the creature, Pelayo and Elisenda begin to reason past the “inconvenience of the wings” and quite intelligently conclude that he is “a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm” (García Márquez 411). This is a more reasoned response to the problem of what they have before them. However, they call over a “neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake” (García Márquez 411). The neighbor woman uses her religious faith and perceives that the creature is an angel of death sent by God to take the couple’s sick child. The “flesh-and-blood angel” is now “held captive” (García Márquez 411) by Pelayo and Elisenda; however, their compassion for the captive is limited. The members of the community “did not have the heart to club him to death” (García Márquez 411) as the neighbor woman suggested, but Pelayo guarded him with his “bailiff’s club” and “locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop” (García Márquez 411). Having come to a conclusion of what he is, they struggle with what to do with him. Over the course of the story, the creature is caged with chickens, stoned, burned, fed mothballs, and otherwise mistreated (García Márquez 412-13). Reconciling the dual perceptions of castaway (reasoned response) and angel (faith-based response), Pelayo and Elisenda “felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas” (García Márquez 411). However, when they see the curiosity the neighbors have about the creature, they become opportunistic and treat the creature as “a circus animal” (García Márquez 411). The creature makes them wealthy when they start “charging five cents admission to see the angel” (García Márquez 412). Showing how faith affects human perception, García Márquez satirizes the pilgrims who come to have the “angel” miraculously “cure” their ailments and deformities. When the curiosity dies down, discredited by a priest who notes that the creature speaks no Latin, “the language of God” (García Márquez 411), and the inappropriate “cures” of the creature’s miracles, such as the blind man who grows new teeth (García Márquez 413), the creature is left largely alone. Elisenda is relieved when the creature flies away, “no longer an annoyance in her life” (García Márquez 415). That which cannot be explained is ultimately an annoyance to the community. Biographer Raymond Williams concludes, “The text offers no rational explanation for the enigmatic man” and, therefore, is “a parody of the interpretative process” (95). Ultimately, Williams adds, “The reader approaches interpretation with extreme caution: attributing symbolic value to either the old man or his inexplicable final act probably will be just one more act of pointless interpretation” (97). Thus, ironically, the task that the reader and the community take on in the story itself, interpreting the central symbol, is not possible from the clues García Márquez provides, revealing the limits of human perception in a world where much is unknown to us as humans. The story is not “A Tale for Children.” Works CitedBell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1990. Print.García Márquez, Gabriel. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, and Writing. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 7th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. 410-415. Print.McFarland, Ronald E. “Community and Interpretive Communities in Stories by Hawthorne, Kafka, and García Márquez.” Studies in Short Fiction 29.4 (1992): 555-559. Humanities International Complete. Web. 31 July 2011.Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne, Alex SummersProfessor DiazENG 102 008August 2, 2011A Lesson on Inhumanity in “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Aristotle famously explained that the two principal purposes of literature are to enlighten and to delight. Over time, fiction has been used to instruct and to divert in different proportions, but the most winning combination may be the use of fiction to teach moral lessons through entertainment. In this example of magic realism, Gabriel García Márquez presents a figure that challenges human beings to see the inadequacy of their rationality, their religion, their empathy, and more. Raising more questions than he answers, the author provokes readers into reflecting on what it means to be a good person in “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1968). The power to reason has been understood as one of the defining traits of humanity, and human beings have tended to have a rather high opinion of ourselves on that account. By putting a creature that defies rational experience at the center of his tale, García Márquez illustrates the sad limits of reason in dealing with the title character. Into Pelayo’s average life arrives an old man “dressed like a ragpicker,” with “only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth” (García Márquez 410). Pelayo and his wife, Elisenda, it is assumed would know how to handle this “pitiful . . . drenched great-grandfather,” except for his having “huge buzzard wings” (García Márquez 410). Reason—backed by the experience of countless generations—dictates that a man should not have the wings of a bird growing from his back. They deduce in their ignorance that their visitor must be a “castaway from some foreign land” since, obviously, no one like him has ever appeared in their yard before now (García Márquez 411). Like any rational people, Pelayo and Elisenda consult another person to learn more about this unaccountable situation. The voice of wisdom, a “woman who kn[ows] everything about life and death,” pronounces categorically that the old, winged man is none other than “an angel” so “old that the rain knocked him down” (García Márquez 411). Supernatural beings fall outside the range of rational human experience, but as Gene H. Bell-Villado notes in García Márquez: The Man and His Work, “everything about the visitor completely contradicts our standard, mythified, Western image of God’s angels” (136). Under such circumstances, when our powers of observation and the opinion of an “expert” do not satisfy, human beings for millennia have turned to a higher authority: religion. As the man with the most formal education in the village, the parish priest is the logical choice for advice. When Father Gonzaga observes first-hand that the winged old man cannot return the priest’s addresses in Latin, Gonzaga doubts his celestial origins; after all, an angel would surely “understand the language of God [and] know how to greet His ministers” (García Márquez 411). Despite his best, if limited, efforts, Father Gonzaga is but one man. His appeals to the highest level of Roman Catholic authority on earth also fail to improve the situation. The Vatican officials have further questions about the mysterious old man that recall the sophistries of medieval monks: does he possess “a navel” and “how many times [can he] fit on the head of a pin” (García Márquez 413)? In Gabriel García Márquez, Raymond L. Williams explains that “[e]ven the possibility of divine origin is enough to sustain the belief in the town that the old man might have the ability to perform miracles. A horde of the sick and the handicapped throng to his side in search of a cure” (94). Such behavior, however, is not religious faith as much as it is the desperate hope of people without worldly recourse. The unfortunates who clamor for miracles are not that different from Pelayo and Elisenda, who seek only to get something for themselves from the mysterious winged visitor. More disturbing to the reader than the failures of rationality and religion in “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is the utter lack of empathy displayed in the short story. The old man’s “hosts” lock him up in a cage, charge gawkers an admission fee, and grow rich from the proceeds of their capitalistic venture. The onlookers wonder about what use may be made of this creature. “[M]ayor of the world,” “five-star general in order to win all wars,” the sire of “a race of winged men”—all of the common people’s thoughts tend toward how the old man may assist them in world domination through politics, war, and even eugenics (García Márquez 411). They long to have someone whom they can control “take charge of the universe” (García Márquez 411). This may be understandable; the rational dream of the disempowered is power, promising the security that is absent in average lives. Nevertheless, the exploitative and self-centered treatment visited upon the winged man illustrates the painfully inhumane way that communities fail to extend basic empathy to a non-threatening outsider or “other.” Ronald McFarland examines the use of the other in “Community and Interpretive Communities in Stories by Hawthorne, Kafka and García Márquez.” He argues that even though the other is not guilty of “reject[ing] the community[, in] repudiating the differentness that identifies the individual, the communities have rejected the man” (McFarland 559). Sadly, human beings—individually and collectively—in this tale do not abide by the golden rule. Even the local doctor brought in to examine the feverish “angel” does not treat his patient as he would like to be treated. Instead, the medical man approaches this unaccountable man with a scientist’s detachment, marveling at “the logic of his wings . . . that [seem] so natural on that completely human organism” (García Márquez 414), the “organism” undercutting the “human.”Perhaps the logic, religion, and empathy of the people are inadequate because the old man cannot communicate through language with those around him. After all, the throng quickly transfers its interest to “the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents” (García Márquez 413). As riveting as the side show is, “[w]hat [is] most heart-rending . . . [is] not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recount[s] the details of her misfortune” (García Márquez 413). Had the winged old man the ability to use language to communicate with his captors, the priest, the villagers, and the doctor, he may have been treated better than he was. Williams has identified “with respect to García Márquez the writer . . . the antirationalist mode of thought that permeates all of his fiction” (93; emphasis added). If the author has little faith in reason, he appears to believe that “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” can entertain readers with a moral lesson. This work is subtitled “A Tale for Children,” which suggests that readers should be encouraged to approach it with the openness of the young (García Márquez 410). Ultimately, if religion provides no more clarity than the light of secular reason, and if the empathy of adults is so deficient, then maybe we should use García Márquez’s short story as a lesson in how not to behave.Works CitedBell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1990. Print.García Márquez, Gabriel. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, and Writing. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 7th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. 410-415. Print.McFarland, Ronald E. “Community and Interpretive Communities in Stories by Hawthorne, Kafka, and García Márquez.” Studies in Short Fiction 29.4 (1992): 555-559. Humanities International Complete. Web. 31 July 2011.Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Print. Pat WalkerProfessor DiazENG 102 008August 2, 2011A Search for Identity: Who is the Very Old ManWith Enormous Wings? Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel prize-winning, Latin American writer, sets his short story “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” in a poor village on the edge of the ocean where it has been raining for three days. Literary critic Ronald McFarland suggests that “[i]t is always difficult to locate García Márquez’s stories in time, but the recent past seems probable, despite the outlandish events” (554). When the story opens, the day is overcast and gray. In fact, it is so dark in the middle of the day that Pelayo, one of main characters, cannot clearly see what it is that is “moving and groaning “in the back of his courtyard (García Márquez 410). What he finally sees is quite unexpected. It is a very old man, who is lying in the mud and who cannot seem to stand because of his enormous wings. Pelayo is shocked, perplexed, and frightened. The identity of this strange creature is not at all clear to him. Pelayo runs into the house to get his wife, Elisenda, who is taking care of their sick baby, asking her to come outside with him to see if she can discern the identity of this strange man. They are speechless as the two of them look more closely at the man. He is poorly dressed, “has only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth” (García Márquez 410). His wings are reminiscent of the wings of a buzzard, but they are filthy and bedraggled. When they try to talk with the man, they find he speaks a foreign language. They guess that perhaps he has arrived “from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm” (García Márquez 411). Needing further confirmation, they ask their neighbor for her opinion regarding the identity of the strange old man. Their neighbor is known to be a “woman who [knows] everything about life and death” (García Márquez 411). She answers with certainty that he is an angel (García Márquez 411). However, the neighbor thinks they should club the angel to death because he may not be a force of good. Pelayo and Elisenda are not sure what to do, perhaps because as Gene H. Bell-Villada comments in his book García Márquez: The Man and His Work, he is not the “stereotypically young, heroic-looking” angel with “wings all in white” (136). However, in the middle of the night, their child recovers from his severe fever. They feel kindly toward the angel, perhaps thinking he has had something to do with their son’s recovery. They consider the possibility of putting “the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days” (García Márquez 411). By doing this, they will relinquish their responsibility for the angel, leaving his destiny to fate, but it will not help them discover his identity. When Pelayo and his wife look outside the next morning, they see that many of their neighbors have gathered outside the chicken coop where the angel is confined. Word travels fast in small villages, so it is not long before everyone knows of the arrival of the strange creature. The neighbors do not appear to regard him as an angel of any sort, neither good nor bad, because they are “tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal” (García Márquez 411). Interpretations are to some extent dependent on the opinion of the larger community, so again the couple is perplexed. The confusion over the man’s identity escalates. Some of the least sophisticated citizens of the town think that the old man should become mayor. Other people want him made into a general who can lead the army, making sure that their country will “win all wars” (García Márquez 411). Still others want him to father “a race of winged wise men who [can] take charge of the universe” (García Márquez 411). The priest, however, is suspicious that the creature is not really an angel because he does not understand Latin. Further, he notices a terrible smell emanating from the man. In addition, he notices that the man’s wings are filled with parasites. To the priest, these reasons call the man’s identity as a possible angel into question. The priest plans to write to his bishop, who will then follow the appropriate hierarchy of the church administration by contacting the Supreme Pontiff, the pope, to get a final decision as to whether or not the man is an angel. It is important to keep in mind that the story is set in a predominately Roman Catholic country, so the opinion of the pope will carry much weight in determining the man’s identity. Unfortunately, the message from the church becomes entangled in church bureaucracy with the church responding only with more questions. The church is not able to provide a satisfactory answer. The confusion over the identity of this old man with enormous wings continues. A carnival-like atmosphere develops, with the arrival of an actual carnival complete with “a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times” (García Márquez 412). Elisenda, Pelayo’s wife, begins charging five cents to anyone who wants to look at the strange creature. People come to see the angel seeking cures for their ailments. Elisenda and her husband, however, benefit, “for in less than a week they [have] crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still [reaches] beyond the horizon” (García Márquez 412). This strange old man has brought Elisenda and Pelayo financial benefit. As scholar Raymond L. Williams notes, “They have built a fancy home and Elisenda boasts the finest wardrobe in town” (94). Time passes, and the crowds lose interest with the popularity of the old man diminishing as the crowds become more interested in the story of “the woman who has been turned into a spider for disobeying her parents” (García Márquez 413). The couple, however, has realized financial benefit from the presence of the old man since they are able to build “a two-story, mansion with balconies and gardens . . . with iron bars on the windows so that angels [won’t] get in” (García Márquez 414). Despite a bout of illness, the angel survives the winter “and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers . . . grow on his wings” (García Márquez 415). He is changing. He begins to sing “sea chanteys . . . under the stars” (García Márquez 415). One day as Elisenda watches, the old man flies away until she can hardly see him on the distant horizon. Even though they may never understand who he is, the unexpected stranger has had a positive effect on the lives of Elisanda and Pelayo. Some things in the world benefit us, but they cannot be explained. Works CitedBell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1990. Print.García Márquez, Gabriel. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, and Writing. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 7th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. 410-415. Print.McFarland, Ronald E. “Community and Interpretive Communities in Stories by Hawthorne, Kafka, and García Márquez.” Studies in Short Fiction 29.4 (1992): 555-559. Humanities International Complete. Web. 31 July 2011.Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Print. Arts & Humanities Writing ENG 102 Share QuestionEmailCopy link Comments (0)
