Thesis: The story, “a very old man with enormous wings,” is about Pelayo and Elisenda stumbling upon an angel, keeping it for their own misuse, and in return being ungrateful and unappreciative through the course of housing this creature.
Pelayo and Elisenda find this angel on the shore of their house, they take it in and at first they don’t know what to do with him. “He must have been coming for the child,” (289) Elisenda says referencing their sick baby. That night that they put the angel in the chicken coop, their baby is healed of the fever and the spell of not eating. “Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on the raft with fresh water.” (289) They were originally going to put the angel on the raft and left fate works its course, but then decided against it. Elisenda had the idea because all of the
Much time passes, their child starts walking, and going to school and the couple still has the angel. The chicken coop had collapsed, and Pelayo lets the angel stay in the shed. But only after letting him first in the house, and Elisenda actually shouts “it was awful living in that hell full of angels” (292) kind of ironic I think that she uses hell and angels in the same sentence, when this angel does nothing but good for them. At the end of the story, Elisenda was actually the one to witness the angel fly away after he had finally returned to his normal health, and ungratefully all she could think was, “he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.” (293) This is only one last example of their ungratefulness. Angels are supposed to be a good thing, and they treated him awfully, and w
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