Gabriel Garcia Marquez manages to bring a story to life that has magic, sadness, mystery, greed, enchantment, religion, and wonder all in just a few pages. The main character is the very old man with enormous wings. At no time in the story is he even cared enough about to be given a name. The father of a sick child stumbles upon this man with wings lying face down in the mud during a rainy night unable to get up unsure if he is even alive. "He had to go very close to see that it was and old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings" (Marquez, 2004, 323). In the beginning he even went and asks the neighbor woman who know everything about life and death to take a look at the man they had found and she tells him he is an angel yet he ignores her words. "He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming for the child but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down" (Marquez, 324). The ignorance of the adults in this story is horrific. Here is an angel right before there eyes sent to save there child's life or possible take it to heaven if one wanted to look at it that way. Either way, for whatever reason it was stopped by the storm and made into a circus animal for entrainment purposes. .
The irony of it all is what the angel did bring to the family. It is hard to think of him as coming to take the child's life because he brought so much good to the child. Pelayo and Elisenda started charging people to "view" him after they put him in the chicken coop. This made them rich. After he was no longer a circus act the family did not pay him any attention. He became ill and they were just worried about how too burry a dead angel. "That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels" (Marquez, 2004, 327).