At what point in "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" did you first know that it included elements of fantasy? What is the effect of the second...

The title of
's "" immediately tells a reader that not all is as it might seem within this story;
certainly, human men do not have wings! This is quickly verified within the first paragraph of
the story, when Pelayo discovers the old man lying facedown in the mud, unable to pick himself
up because of the weight of these wings. M¡rquez is a well known magical realist writer whose
approach to literature is to drop elements of the extraordinary into otherwise realistic
worlds.

The second sentence is also highly characteristic of magical realist
writing, in that it imbues a non-human entity ("the world") with the personality
traits and emotions of a human ("was sad"). This is known as , and it is a common
approach within this genre, which frequently views objects and non-living entities as having
agency or "lives" of their own.