Aiden Rivera  

Midterm Essay, ENG 2001 O525  

Oct 26, 2020  

In the End All is Normal 

After reading and carefully analyzing the two stories, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Marquez and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, I’ve come to realize that they have more in common than I previously thought. At a first glance you wouldn’t think of many similarities. Mainly because one is occurring during the civil war and seems more realistic while the other is more mythical or fake by adding an old man who is an “Angel”. But looking deeper you see the main character and gothic element similarities that these two stories share. Bierce and Marquez both write stories where the main characters have the spirit of perverseness (SOP) that ultimately leads to their return to normalcy.   

In the story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, the main character is an old homeless man with broken/unhealthy wings who is taken in by this couple. The couple has the old man live in their shack. They let him live there because they believe he is an angel and he has some correlation to their son, who was sick, get better. The old man proceeds to live with and get fed by this couple. At first it was an act of kindness till the tourist began to come see the old man. After this began to occur the couple began to take profits from the people coming to see the old man. Turning him into a circus act. The wife didn’t want the old man there but once the money came along it became less of a problem. People would even throw things at the old man, treating him as if he was worthless. By the end of the story the old man’s wings became healthy and opened wide, where he then flew away into the sky. The question here is how does the old man relate to the other character and where does he return to normalcy?   

In the story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, the main character Peyton Farquhar is standing on a bridge 20 feet above the water moments away from being hanged. In these few minutes the story takes place we basically go into Peyton’s head and view a back story on how he got into this situation. He was a southerner during the civil war who wasn’t accepted into the confederate army. But he had passion for the cause and would do whatever he could to help. The people about to hang Peyton are from the northern army. Towards the end of the story Peyton is sent off the bridge to hang but the rope snaps and he seems to get away. We end with Peyton seeing his family again and giving his wife a hug. Only to find out it was all in his head. He dreamt that he got away and saw his family again in his final moments. The fact was he didn’t get away but instead those were his final thoughts before his sad death. The question in this story is again how does Peyton relate to the old man and does this count as a return to normalcy?  

The two characters, Peyton and the old man both have the spirit of perverseness that leads to their return to normalcy. Let me explain, a small definition of the spirit of perverseness would be what makes people do things they know will be bad for themselves and others. Peyton follows this definition by being a helping hand in the war even though he wasn’t chosen as a soldier: “No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war” (Bierce 4). Peyton was a slave owner during the civil war, and he was constantly trying to help the cause of the south. He knew that the things he did would possibly be bad for him and bad to the northern soldiers. This is an exact definition of the spirit of perverseness. The old man now follows this same logic by going with the couple to their home. The old man knows this will be bad for him because in the story “angels” are fugitives so not anyone can be trusted: “Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a spiritual conspiracy” (Marquez 1). Also, by going with the family they will be looked at differently for having an angel in their possession. The family had to deal with mobs of people: “The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down” (Marquez 2). This is clear evidence of the character knowing of the harm he causes himself and others. 

Now how does their spirit of perverseness lead to their return to normalcy? Well in Bierce’s story, Peyton is about to be hanged. He is already in the normal there because it is normal for a southern soldier to be hanged by a northern soldier. They are in war so that’s why this is normal. Where Peyton returns to normalcy is when he has the dream of escaping. The dream is not normal. Although a possibility it’s not normal for him to escape that scenario. It is then where he feels a pain in his neck inside the dream and he’s now taken out and returned to normalcy as he dies: “As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence” (Bierce 9). The spirit of perverseness led him to this moment because if not for the decisions he made to help the south he would still be alive. In Marquez’s story the old man’s return to normalcy was a little different. He didn’t start out in the normal. The old man is an angel so his normal isn’t on earth. His wings were not capable of flying so he was stuck on the ground. He returned to normalcy when he became healthy and was able to fly away at the end:  

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn’t get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude (Marquez 4). 

The spirit of perverseness led to this return to normalcy because although he put himself in a bad situation by becoming a tourist attraction it ultimately gave him time to heal and fly away. It says in this quote that he knew he was getting better and hid it from everyone. He got healthy enough to fly away without any problems. This is how the spirit of perverseness led to his return to normalcy. 

In conclusion, the old man and Peyton may be two different characters, but when using the gothic elements, the spirit of perverseness and a return to normalcy, they aren’t very much different. They both have the spirit of perverseness to ultimately return to normalcy. Although Peyton’s return wasn’t as good as the old man. You still can’t help but to sympathize with Peyton and see why his SOP led him to his specific return to normalcy.