Religion as a Synonym of Ignorance
Is the church as solid and strong as it seems? In “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, Garcia Marquez uses magical realism to challenge religious beliefs; hence, proving religion is not what is seems. To begin with, when the old man with enormous wings lands in Elisenda and Pelayo’s courtyard and after concluding that the man must be someone who survived a shipwreck they call their neighbor to see him. Their neighbor proclaims right away that he must be an angel. Her reaction to the man with wings is purely influenced by faith. She blindly assumes things based on what she has been taught her whole life: "He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so
In addition, the final conclusion about that the old man is a norwegian sailor once again ridicules the Church showing such absurd assumptions; nevertheless, he dares to create comparisons to argument his final word about the impostor the angel was, “He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the difference between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels.” (Garcia Marquez 2).
Furthermore, taking the whole Church as a character compared with the angel himself we can see the contrast of true religion and the human representation of it. Meaning that the angel symbolizes religion itself, and the church represents the institution that has corrupted this divine word. Church manipulates everything to be more powerful. In contrast, the angel is extremely patient, he isn’t affected by what people were doing to him and through magical realism, Garcia Marquez manages to create a situation in which church and humans can be looked upon ridiculously because the angel uses all of the things against him to grow strong and flee; wherefore, religion is a bigger authority and more valuable than church as an institution.
To conclude, throughout the whole story we can witness how Garcia Marquez uses magical realism fusing the reality of Colombian society and the divinity and fiction of an angel. He generates a critique towards religion stating that religion acts as a blindfold and limits humans to think