The story treats the supernatural as though it were an everyday occurrence. The people don't seem to be too particularly surprised that an angel has crash-landed into their town. How does this attitude affect your reading of the story?

Marquez was a master of the genre called magic realism. The reader needs to suspend their disbelief a little for the narrative to work. The story illustrates the human need to interpret life's events. The Old Man, an exaggerated dramatization of any strange event, is interpreted in many different ways. Individual characters - the neighbor woman, Pelayo, Elisenda, Father Gonzaga, and all the onlookers - try to attach meaning to the Old Man, or to reduce his meaning, in terms of their own lives. Thus Garcia Marquez stages the inevitable situatedness of human experience. We see things through our own eyes, and the search for a universally applicable meaning is inevitably doomed.