Although the story revolves around and is titled after him, the very old man is never named and never speaks clearly to the other characters. He is treated like a circus animal, speaks and sings to himself in an unknown language, and only reacts to others when they inflict pain on him. His true identity is therefore ambiguous, and both García Márquez’s depiction and the villagers’ opinion of him oscillate; sometimes he is a poor old man, and sometimes he is a mysterious, “haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals” (Paragraph 10). Instead of an autonomous character, the old man acts as a reflection of others’ beliefs and goals—in particular, whatever “miracles” they think they can get out of him. He thus becomes a vessel for showing the darker side of human nature, which captures and exploits the things we find strange; just as the old man provides entertainment to the story‘s characters, he serves as a narrative and philosophical tool for the author himself.

This perhaps explains the story’s ending, which finally gives the old man enough freedom to recover and make his own decisions—although only after the crowd has finished with him and moved on to a new curiosity.