Possible Worlds in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

The present study attempts to apply Marie-Laure Ryan’s theory of “Possible Worlds,” as a branch of Cognitive Poetics, to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s postmodern short story, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (1955), to show how characters’ different treatments of the world define and move the narrative structure of the story forward. The aim of this study is thus to look into how the characters in Marquez’s story define different types of alternative possible worlds, such as Knowledge worlds, Prospective Extensions of Knowledge worlds, Intention worlds, Obligation worlds, Wish worlds, and Fantasy Universes. This reading also hopes to examine what Ryan calls “The Accessibility Relations,” and pursue the internal conflicts between the actual world of the text and the private worlds of the different characters as a means of showing how reality and imagination stands as two incompatible worlds in postmodern society. The paper finally concludes in determining these worlds’ interactions and their conflicts, and how they make possible the plot development and, in Ryan’s terms, its “tellability.”

Keywords:

Possible Worlds , Gabriel Garcia Marquez , A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings , tellability , postmodernism