Magical Strategies and Reality of Latin America in Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”

Abstract

Gabriel García Márquez is a renowned Colombian novelist, short story writer, and a journalist. He is a Nobel Prize winner and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He revolutionized modern literature with his unique style of magical realism, blending the magical and the mundane, to reveal deeper truths about Latin American societies and history. Magical realism is a literary technique that combines realistic elements with supernatural, creating a world where impossible events coexist naturally with ordinary life. Márquez’s literary discourse portrays Latin American society with its varied cultural features and complicated history. Latin America has endured political oppression and foreign economic exploitation, during and after colonialism. The process of colonialism left a legacy that deteriorated the social, religious, and cultural beliefs of the region and created a symbolic void among people. The themes in Marquez’s works are deeply rooted in his concern for his society reflecting both the vulnerability and the resilience of Latin American communities. Beneath the layers of magic and myth lies a compassionate understanding of people caught in the relentless cycles of exploitation, oppression, and injustice. Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” serves as a brilliant exploration of callousness of Latin American people and highlights the absence of empathy by religious or political authority in the society. This paper aims to analyze how Márquez’s narrative offers a critique of the corruption within the Roman Catholic Church in the story and highlights people’s role in day-to-day matters in a post-colonial Latin America, during the second half of the twentieth century.