The Giving Tree vs “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” free essay sample

The commonality between Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s â€Å"The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings† and Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, is the exploitation of a grotesque character and the sacrifices they make for the sake of their relationships and situation. Each exploited character represents that gullible and somewhat easily exploitable part of us, that will go to great lengths to keep those we think show us love and acceptance, fulfilled and enticed. By using the grotesque, the reader is allowed to immerse themselves in the amplified personas of these fantastic characters, and their motivation to indulge the selfish, thoughtless, abuse of their resources and basic rights. William T. Free describes the grotesque in writing as â€Å"something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister† (Free 216). The boy’s need for the tree and the town’s reaction to the angel gives us a peek into the duality of grotesque behavior. We see them being playfully gay in their genuine fascination at the old man’s otherworldly appearance, and ominous and sinister in their decision to keep him locked in a chicken coop on display for the horde of paying onlookers â€Å" they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Garcia Marquez 272) The tree is assigned the role of the loving mother figure, showering her boy with selfless, unbridled love; she sees him as belonging to her and her to him. True to her role she provides a happy, nurturing environment, in which she feeds his body with her apples and his mind when he is at play â€Å"He would climb her trunk and swing from her branches and eat apples† (Silverstein n. p. ). She provides shade and a place for him to rest, and as he grows a place for him to explore the world of courtship. As he ventures out into the world and his needs change, she becomes a wealth of resources, providing apples no longer just for eating, but for selling, while her body becomes wood for building his house and a  boat â€Å"And so the boy cut off her branches and carried them away to build his house† (Silverstein n. p. ). Eventually she is nothing but stump, and intimates as much to her boy, now an old man; only to find that she is still of use to her boy as a final place of rest â€Å"Well,† said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could, â€Å"well an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest† (Silverstein n. p.) The boy in return never exhibits any sign of gratitude, never a thank you or any inquiry as to the tree’s wellbeing. This is not to say that the boy does not love his tree â€Å"And the boy loved the tree very much† (Silverstein n. p. ), however, he has never had the burden of reciprocity levied upon him. As a little boy he gathers her leaves and her fruit while using her body for play, but his maturation is accompanied by needs no longer solely dependent upon the tree â€Å"I want a wife and I want children, and so I need a house. Can you give me a house? † (Silverstein n. p. ). As he ventures out to find his place in the world, his visits are fewer and farther apart; and when he does visit it is to strip her of some other resource. Eventually he returns to his tree, old and tired to claim the very last thing she has to offer, still for his own use. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s old man entered the town in the body of a supernatural being, with less than supernatural characteristics, save for patience comparable to Job’s. When he is come upon by Pelayo, he is face down in the mud, â€Å"his huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked† (Garcia Marquez 271) and in an extremely weakened state. His broken, pathetic, bald, almost toothless, great-grandfather appearance is interrupted only by his enormous wings, and his state of imprisonment made worse by his inability to verbally communicate with his captors. Spending most of his time confined to a chicken coop and a shed, the opportunity to explore his surroundings comes only after the coop’s collapse. This was achieved by dragging himself about the house and becoming an inescapable presence or kind of playful poltergeist to the members of the household â€Å"He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he’d been duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house†¦ (Garcia Marquez 275). Managing to make it through a winter of fevers, delirium while sleeping outdoors in a shed he regains his strength and sprouts a few new feathers to aid in his very clumsy departure. The town’s reaction to the old man runs the gamut of emotions and touches on the fickleness of human behavior. Here we have this creature, fantastic in appearance who is met with fear, awe, skepticism, doubt and hostility within his first twenty-four hours in town. He is first discovered by the town’s bailiff, who skitters right from fear, to consulting the town’s wise woman, then to keeping armed watch before locking him up with livestock. A possible harbinger of calm and prosperity or chaos and failure, depending on perspective, his coming may have brought an end to the deluge and the child’s affliction, while blessing Pelayo and Elisenda with significant financial gain â€Å"Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money† (Garcia Marquez 273). However the eventual distortion of Elisinda’s spine, and throng of pokers, mockers and prosecutors of an old man whose only sins were his appearance and mediocre magic, speaks of man’s inclination to rally against the weaker and different among us and the pitfalls of personal progress. Also highlighted is the ineptitude of the community’s leading authority on all things celestial when the priest’s papal correspondence, inspection and nattering brought nothing, because the old man failed to meet any of the church’s angel benchmarks â€Å"But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just Norwegian with wings† (Garcia Marquez 274). Just as quickly as he attracted them, he lost his fickle following; to what may have been an even more fantastic creature – one who could speak. Respite from the daily demands of being the town’s grand freak, takes the form of a travelling carnival and sideshow horror of a woman smitten with a spider’s body on account of filial disobedience. This new grotesque body came with the advantage of a voice, thereby providing a window into the background of the being, and lending support to history presenting sideshow freaks to be willing participants, for personal gain or to challenge the notion of the beautiful or normative body. While the old man in contrast â€Å"was the only one who took no part in his own act† (Garcia Marquez 273), his fantastic form, is a reflection of man’s endeavor to make sense of himself and his universe, through romanticism and comparison to the mental construct of the ideal being. Following a period of undisturbed rest, the old man’s wounds heal, and early December brings him a fresh batch of large, stiff, scarecrow feathers and the ability to fly away and remove himself from his abusive situation; while the tree is trapped in her body, now stripped of all her offerings and left with nothing but her dying boy. By employing the use of the grotesque, the authors move their presentation of the perils of exploitative relationships and the mercurial state of the human mind from under the microscope and into the realm of a full-fledged parade; with a fantastic lineup of characters not bound by the shackles of reality, inviting us to get caught up in the flapping of wings and the â€Å"whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. † (Garcia Marquez 273). The grotesque serves to present a more palatable helping of the everyday insipid and macabre, by rendering the ominous and sinister, less so with the use of the playfully gay and carelessly fantastic as a counterbalance.