Special Post #2

In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children”, the basis of the story is that a newly married couple with a baby struggling to survive, finds an angel in their yard. It becomes an instant attraction to anyone within driving distance and beyond. It is kept in the chicken coop and not treated with any sort of decency by the onlookers who pay the couple in order to witness the angel. This causes the couple to be able to help their child regain his health as well as build themselves a mansion, all because of the people that came to see the angel. Now, the angel was not exactly treated kindly by everyone, in fact, it was quite the opposite. He was interrogated, burned, beat around, etc. The child ends up getting better and grows up with the angel as a part of his life. Towards the end of the story they try to move the angel inside, but end up bringing it to the barn. At the end of the story, there is a slight sense of hope as the angel regains his ability to fly and leaves the family as he flies into the sunset.

The reason I feel that this text needs to be interpreted is that you could read through it over and over and get something different out of it every time. It’s not a text that I can just sit down, interpret it, and that would be the end of it. Another reason that I chose this text was the fact that I didn’t understand the point to this text at all the first time I read it, so I figured it would help me grow as a reader and a writer to try and interpret it. So here goes….

In couple round about ways, this angel reminded me of what Jesus was to us. I mean, in the story the angel shows up “On the third day of rain…”, similar to how Jesus  arose from the grave after 3 days. The part that struck me though is how the angel handled his persecutors while saving the family and child’s life. Very much like our savior, he took everything without complaining because he knew its what had to be done. No amount of taunting, teasing, prodding could cause him to show emotion, which instantly reminded me of how Christ was ridiculed daily while walking the earth and how calmly he handled it.

A couple things I haven’t figured out quite yet how they tie in yet is why was the angel so old? Why did the neighbor want it dead so badly? Why did the family seem afraid of it?

The main part that I still haven’t decided how I feel about though, is the end. I sway back and forth from thinking it’s a positive ending full of hope, or a depressing ending and a sign of how sometimes we let blessings slip away before we realize they were there. At the end of the story it says “Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she saw him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture….” See, that makes it seem like the woman thinks they will be better off without the angel. Though it makes me wonder if the author is trying to show how we can get caught in how smooth our life is going and not recognize when such a big blessing is right in front of our face. I mean, isn’t it possible that the angel that they found was their guardian angel using a creative way to save the family? If that is the case then its kind of depressing because they treated an angel so poorly for so long, meaning it probably will never come back even if they needed it.

After reading this a couple times, it really started to strike me inside. It made me think about everything I have to be thankful for in this life and how I show my gratitude for those things. Do I make sure to make it obvious that I am incredibly blessed and thankful? Or do I just lock everything up in a chicken coop because I make my own luck? I know that might sound corny but that’s what I got out of this story. Maybe some other day, some other time in my life I might be struck by something completely unrelated. Just as I am sure that other readers got things totally different than I did.

Overall, I never at once thought there was a clear interpretation to this text. As one of my friends put it, “Ambiguity reigns, and the people in the story-like the readers of the story-merely interpret events, never understanding them. Thus the story defies attempts at interpretation even as it stages the human need to interpret. In short, it is more concerned with the fact that we interpret than with what we interpret. It's a fairy tale without an interpretation; rather, it's a fairy tale about interpretation.” I think that sums it up perfectly. The point of the story will never be one specific thing. The simplest way I can think to describe it is to say that the point of the text is to cause you to TRY and interpret, not figure out exactly what it is trying to say.