Reader Response for Gabriel Marquez

            I personally enjoyed reading “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest drowned Man in the World” by: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, they were both very intriguing and made me intervene with the stories to understand what was going on.  His stories create a curiosity and image that kept me interested, which is what I like and understand while reading.

            In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, Marquez creates an image of this old, ugly man with no teeth, and wings that were ugly and infected with parasites to be an angel. With this image created, he is showing the reader how if something doesn’t conform to how society as a whole views it,  then it is wrong. In this case, by making the old man this ugly bird like creature, the people in the town tormented him and were burdened by him because he did not fit their ideal angel nor did he speak like the priest thought an angel should.

 For me, I was kind of disgusted when I began reading that this ugly creature could be an angel, because I’ve been raised to believe they are beautiful with white wings. This was humorous, because this is exactly what Marquez wanted to prove that not everything is how you’ve been raised to believe it is and when I finished reading the story my view was completely changed. I can relate to this story through everyday life mainly through personal image. In America, the ideal image is thin and pretty, only looking at the outside rather than on the inside. Beauty is not only what is on the outside, but also on the in, and society is blinded by that due to how the media portrays image to be. I also think that I can relate to this story through religious views, everyone has different views of religion and different Gods to worship so to speak, which brings controversy to right and wrong within religions.

In the second story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”, Marquez creates this fantasy over a dead guy that also causes people of the village to become consumed and crazed by his handsomeness, just like people are with celebrities. This story was very amusing to me, the whole time not only because the man was dead, but also because the people were just acting crazy over him like they knew his whole life story. The class discussion over this story really helped me in what Marquez wanted the reader to understand from it.

 Basically people tend to become so manifested, and obsessed with a fantasy that they begin to believe it is real, losing the connection with the true reality of life, my favorite example was the Playboy magazines because it explains exactly this. I can relate to this short story through many of different ways, first by reading magazines or watching television. I find myself always buying the make-up, clothes, and perfume that my favorite celebrities are wearing, because I feel like if I can own/ wear all of it that I will become like them which is a fantasy. I also had a friend who was obsessed with Taylor Swift, she dyed her hair the same color, started taking vocal lessons to sing like her, and wore the same clothes. I thought she was rather crazy, but she truly believed she was, if not better than Taylor Swift and lost touch with the true reality.

Both of these stories, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” are similar because through both Marquez describes how people become so involved and reformed to how society portrays what is right and wrong, that they lose their own personal belief and individualism causing them live in a fantasied world. Through both stories, I personally feel like Marquez is trying to tell people to hold onto their beliefs and dare to be different from what is declared by everyone else as “right” and “wrong”. I think that through his writing, I look at Marquez as a person who is not afraid to state that he thinks differently from everyone else, obviously one can see this through both of his short stories. Why not dare to be different?