The people actually empathized with the spider. While the winged man, who looks "much too human" and more like the villagers than the spider herself, ironically does not receive a single iota of empathy, the spider wins all the villagers' affection because her inspiring story contains a moral (107). On the other hand, the winged man's situation reflects realities the villagers do not wish to acknowledge: poverty, helplessness, and homelessness. This revelation recontextualizes the villagers' actions. Greed did not cause them to dehumanize the winged man but hypocritical prejudice and selective empathy. The one factual difference between the spider and the winged man was that the villagers could understand the former's story and feel inspired. For all the villagers know, the winged man could be a human cursed with wings after disobeying his parents. But the villagers …show more content…
Because they cannot understand the winged man, they othered, dehumanized, and abused him for their own gain. Their hypocritical prejudice, selective empathy, language barrier, and ethnocentrism blinded them from seeing the humanity in him.
Here is where "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" bleeds into reality. Humans have conquered other humans throughout history through dehumanization. What allows a soldier to pull the trigger while staring into the eyes of a mother and child is that they do not see a human; they see an ant. By severing that basic foundation of relatability and othering different people, humans could commit atrocities against one another. The same logic applies to the villagers and how—even at the very end, after the winged man earns her a two-story mansion—Elisenda is happy when he finally leaves because "he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on