Empathy In Literature

The point that I am going to argue about is the topic of arguing the importance of empathy compare to sympathy in literature. The empathy is literate meaning of understanding and knowing one’s feeling and emotions. Moreover, it also bases on your own experience to understand other person’s situation. However, sympathy is more of pretending to be caring someone’s feeling, and it actually doesn’t touch one’s feeling like you really mean it. In literature pieces, thinking of understanding either character or author’s feeling is really important to grasp the real meaning of literature when you actually read the books, articles, or journals. For that matter understanding how to view characters or flow of the literature, importance of empathy can …show more content…
For example, according to Siegel’s article, it mentions that Iago is more of empathetic person, but Othello is more of sympathetic person and only knows his nobleness. Looking at this example, the literature shows that Iago is characterized as a person with empathy no matter what with understanding others based off of his experience, and Othello is characterized as not caring other people and considered, as nobleness is the priority of all. Because of those two different types of characteristics, the outcome of two people are completely opposite in a way of positive and negative. It doesn’t mean sympathy is always negative characteristic, but it influences more towards negative things rather than person who has empathy. In this article, it also mentions that empathy would do a great job on understanding sad people and walking through the sadness together to know people in deeper way. In addition, it also brings more positive characteristics such as generosity and knowing how to be self-sacrifice when …show more content…
The one of points that I make are that in literature setting, there are more empathetic characters involved to emphasize positiveness and sympathetic characters are more involved with negativeness. The example of Othello and Iago is clear example that expresses both characteristics. The second point that I make is expressing different way to approach of empathy and sympathy with liking someone and understanding someone in literature setting. The last point that I make is that empathy is the critical base of literature rather than sympathy in literature setting. From the example of research article, it mentions about sympathy would break down without empathy because empathy has more important part in literature that can stand by itself, but not sympathy by itself. All in all, the empathy should be used more often to spread the message to readers for positive thoughts for understanding literature in a good way in the