How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #4
But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal. (4)
And here we get the sad but all too real way that most people react to a foreign element: they treat it like a freak show. (How does your school treat exchange students, hm?)
Quote #5
Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an impostor when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. (5)
The language divide gets complicated here, because the angel doesn't speak Spanish, the local language, but he also doesn't speak Latin, a language that would be foreign to most of the townspeople but is used in religious ceremonies. What does that tell us about the distance between the people and their religious leaders? Who's the real foreigner here?
Quote #6
He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. (8)
Look at the way that Gárcia Márquez brings all kind of foreignness into this one sentence, jackhammering it into the reader's brain that this guy is an Other: "hermetic language," "lunar dust," and "panic" from out of this world. Okay, okay, Gabo: we get it.