The Point

Will in Big Fish is an example of how people can be ignorant. Will thinks his dad's stories are pointless and even gets annoyed by them. Because of this ignorance, he often misses the point. When Ed tells Will how he went to Sandra's college and how he planted flowers and how he wrote his love in the sky, Will is skeptical and annoyed about the number of times he's heard the story. Ed is trying to explain his love for Will's mother and how he fought for her, but Will doesn't get that because he's caught up in the sheer improbability be of it all. Another example of Will's ignorance is when Ed tells him the story of the big fish. Ed was intending the big fish story to be an example of how Ed never really fit in his life. Will completely misses the point that his dad is trying to tell him that it's ok not to exactly fit the mold of what other people think. Because of Will's ignorance, he totally misreads his dad as an immature liar, when really, all he wanted to do was teach Will the most important parts of his life.

Pelayo and Elisenda from A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale For Children are examples of how people can miss the point of things in life. An angel appears in Pelayo and Elisenda's yard and instead of realizing it's importance and beauty, they doubt it's importance. They lock the angel up in a cage and sell tickets to it. The angel then performed miracles but not the one's that that they had expected. "Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn't recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didnt get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers" (Marquez 4). The couple doesn't see these things as miracles even though they are. The angel gave hope and turned something that was seen as a bad thing, into a good thing and that was the miracle  The couple missed that because they were caught up in what they expected was going to happen. Even at the end of the story, Elisenda still sees the angel as a nuisance. "She kept watching him even when she was though cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him., because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea" (Marquez 5). Elisenda saw the angel as an annoyance instead of a blessing. The couple didn't see the true majesty of the angel because it wasn't what they had expected an angel to be like. This shows how people can miss something beautiful that's happening right in front of them because it's not what they expected.