Mutual Identities: Fostering Empathy between Readers and Characters in Reading a Work of Fiction

Abstract

Empathy is often seen fostered through teaching of literature, particularly fiction, and influencing readers’ behavior and emotions. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between readers' and characters' mutual identities as witnessed in the form of a literary empathy created by reading a work of fiction. A qualitative research design helped in in-depth understanding of participants’ experiences, by adopting an empirical stylistic approach to conduct a thematic analysis of readers’ responses, combining stylistic-narratological analysis of two sampled texts, Amy Tan’s Two Kinds and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Both datasets were collected through a Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ) and analyzed to understand how literature, particularly fiction, stimulated empathy in individual readers. The readers’ responses mechanism was aptly supported by Theory of mind and Decety's and Gerdes' empathy development theories to understand how readers develop mental flexibility and experience emotional empathy to understand characters’ emotions. The results revealed the intensity of readers’ connection with the characters while they introspected through the text and correlated themselves with human emotions resulting in empathy with the characters of the text.  The findings imply that literature equips students and readers with the capacity to cultivate empathy through an emotional appraisal of characters.