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Literary Devices
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a short story that belongs to the genre of magical realism. Magical realist literature, which originated in 20th-century Latin America with authors like Marquez, combines believable realist elements with fantastical ones. In “A Very Old Man,” the magical realism comes through in the way that angels and spider-human hybrids exist in an otherwise very realistic world (where people face financial hardship, the Catholic Church holds sway, etc.).
The following passage—in which the narrator describes the existence of a spider woman—captures the way that the story combines the magical and the mundane:
It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents […] She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune.
In this passage, the narrator contextualizes a “woman who had been changed into a spider” as just one of many carnival attractions that came through town, noting that what most captured the townspeople about the spider woman was not “her outlandish shape” but “the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune.” In other words, the townspeople were unsurprised to meet such a creature and therefore listen to—and believe—her story with rapt attention. This sort of acceptance of the fantastical is common in magical realist literature.
Related Themes:
