However, as I reread the two stories, I asked myself if the readers Gabriel Garcia Marquez had in mind were really only children. I had always thought The Little Prince and Guliver’s Travels were children’s stories until I read then again as a teenager. It was after I learned more about the world (both of more experience and disappointment of the reality) that I truly appreciated the stories and interpreted them as types of satire. Taking The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World and A very Old Man with Enormous Wings into an adult’s point of view, and reflecting on them more critically, I noticed that these two stories were more profound.
While The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World seems to be a story about how the village people appreciated and the dead man and were influenced positively by him, looking at this from another perspective, we can see how shallow these people were. The villagers took a foreign dead man as a god-like figure just by his looks, and changed their village completely because of him. The once “[desolated] … streets, [dry] … courtyards, [narrow] … dreams” all changed to “gay colors, … plating flowers …” just to make “Esteban’s memory eternal.” It seems almost sarcastic to make a story based on such easily influenced people – influenced no other than a corpse. Marquez may have wanted children to see how some people, even a dead one, can influence others through this story. However, taking a distant look, he may have wanted adults to see the hidden foolishness beneath this story.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings also seems to have a hidden meaning. From a child’s point of view, this may be a story about how a poor angel finally frees from dominating house owner. However, to the adult reading this, this may be a depiction of mobocracy. If the townspeople had doubted their neighbor’s words of the angel being “a fugnitive survivor of a celestial conspiracy” just once, he wouldn’t have been treated as a “circus animal.” Not even one person was skeptical of such assertion. In fact, such belief made the two house owners, Pelayo and Elisenda, more successful. “With the money they saved (from the “carnival attraction”) they built a two-story mansion with balconies … crabs wouldn’t get in … angels wouldn’t get in.” A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings seems to portray how the mob may ruin a good person (by the end of the story we see that in the presence of the angel, the child grew up to be healty, and triggered many “miracles”).
The old man from the story A very old man with enormous wings and Esteban from the story The Handsomest drowned man in the world are opposites of each other, maybe the only similarity that they have is that they are both flat and static characters. First, they are different in terms on how they are portrayed. The old man who is an angel, was portrayed as an ugly old man who doesn’t even resemble an angel. We can see this in paragraph 2, “He was dressed like a rag picker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth…” While Esteban who is a only a dead guy was portrayed as a good looking guy. We can see this in paragraph 4, “Not only was he the tallest and strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination”.

They also have different effects on the story. The old man, has a positive effect on the story. Since he appeared in the story, Pelayo’s family got lucky. Several events can prove this, in paragraph 4, “the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat” and in paragraph 11, “with the money they saved they built a two-story mansion…” On the other hand, Esteban has quite a negative effect in the story. Since he appeared in the story, the women started comparing their husbands to him and because of this the women started to view their husbands as weak. This event can be seen in paragraph 4, “They secretly compared him to their own men…”