A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: Situational Irony 2 key examples

Additionally, the appearance of an angel, at least in the Christian tradition, often prefigures the occurrence of a profound miracle. The angel in the story is unable to perform such miracles, as the following passage captures:

[T]he few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun […] ruined the angel’s reputation.

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Here the narrator describes the not-so-miraculous “miracles” that the angel causes, such as a blind man growing new teeth, a paralytic person “almost” winning the lottery, and a leper growing sunflowers out of their sores. The narrator notes the irony of these miracles when describing them as being “like mocking fun.”

In having the angel be unable (or possibly unwilling) to produce the sort of miracles expected of him, Marquez forces the townspeople to decide whether they will look upon such an angel with respect, or if they will cast him aside for not giving them what they want. They ultimately cast him aside, Marquez’s way of showing the limits of human compassion while warning readers not to fall into this trap themselves.

The first hint that the town as a whole is going to treat this sacred figure with cruelty and disrespect is Pelayo and Elisenda’s reaction to finding him washed up in their courtyard at the beginning of the story:

Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm.

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Here, the couple concludes, after “skip[ing] over the inconvenience of the wings,” that the angel must be “a lonely castaway from some foreign ship” because he speaks a language with which they are unfamiliar. Instead of responding with shock and admiration to the appearance of a winged man in their yard (or pausing to tend to the feeble man), they question him and then file away his existence into an easily-dismissed category of “other.”

This initial lack of empathy shown by Pelayo and Elisenda leads to a cascade of cruelty from the town as a whole, Marquez’s way of highlighting how a single instance of lack of empathy, no matter how small, can lead to communal moral decline.