In Gabriel Garc­a M¡rquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," why does the angel appear in the form of a very old man who speaks like a...

In 's
"," the author might be trying to get you to ask almost the opposite question, i.e.
Why shouldnt an angel appear in the form of an old man with an odd
accent?

On the accent, the villagers are not presented as the sort of
cosmopolitans who can identify specific foreign accents, so that rather than Norwegian it is
better to think of his voice as different or not local.

Next, if you
think of the angel in the Christian context in which Marquez lived and wrote, consider that
Jesus, the son of God, appears in the Bible not as a handsome aristocrat, but as a poor
carpenter from the hick town of Nazareth and many people in the New Testament are seen as
reviling him and not taking him seriously because he is poor and uneducated.


The angel, as Jesus, serves as a test of peoples moral character. The people
who mistreated the angel, because he was a poor shabby old man, like those who reviled Jesus,
are showing themselves unworthy of the gifts that God gave them, a facet of their characters
they might not have shown if God had sent more outwardly impressive
messengers.