Subversion of Grand Narratives and Dictated Rules in “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This article explores Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ ‘The very old Man with Enormous Wings’ through the interdisciplinary perspectives of postmodernism and social political ecology and shows how the author undermines grand narratives praising dictated rules. The article underlines the author’s rejection of predestined ideologies that encourage people to colonize the world and the universe and follow anthropocentric speciesism, economic/political powers, cultural/social flaws, and parental hierarchy. The author shakes the pillars of some grand narratives supporting enforced laws of structural centrism while making a critical/satirical narrative. Grand narratives prepare people for dated roles and impose the dictated instructions of political/economic bonds on them. The short story is equipped with postmodern literary motifs of multiplicity, contradiction, replication, undecidability, satirical description, surprising change, metamorphosis, unsteady status of self/the other, parody, and style of magic realism by which the article uncovers the author’s subversion of destructive relations of power. The article uses Jean-Francois Lyotard’s rejection of grand narratives and Val Plumwood’s undermining of platonic and Cartesian theories of anthropocentric speciesism.