Absolutely True Diary Of A Part Time Indian Analysis

Martin Buber, a philosopher interested in the importance of human connection, poetically summed up the momentous role humans play in each other’s life when he claimed “the world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.” Part of the human experience is trying to find the meaning in everyday occurrences and using these experiences to build connections with other people who make us feel valued. Storytelling plays a huge role in this process as it connects human beings across great distances and time periods. Sharing feelings, thoughts, experiences, and wisdom with others has been occurring since the beginning of time through oral, print, and now digital formats, each capturing the audience’s care

According to an article about the science of storytelling on cmo.com, people have an “innate need for community, intimacy, and storytelling.” By telling stories, individuals meet all of these needs at once. A story written with the intention of provoking empathy creates an intimate connection between the author and the reader as the author’s thoughts are fed into the mind of the reader creating a shared experience and sense of community. In a New York Times Article, Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian recalls the first time he saw a character resembling himself in a story and was transformed into a passionate reader. Stories allow people to find and make meaning by creating a safe space where individuals can relate to a character, share in the human experience, and feel less alone. All of the explanations of why people read and tell stories are somehow related to emotion. We read and tell stories to feel, share, and make sense of feelings. Consequently, it is important to understand the role emotions and empathy play in

Paul Zak recently posted an article on hbr.org about a study he conducted to test the long-term effect of the power of storytelling. Zak took blood samples before and after exposing participants to character-driven video narratives and found that the “stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis… the amount of oxytocin released by the brain predicted how much people were willing to help others; for example, donating money to a charity associated with the narrative.” Zak proved that empathy promoted by stories (including ones told in video form) has an effect on long term behavior. When an audience feels so deeply emotionally connected to a character that lines blur between the characters’ life and the audience’s experiences, the audience will feel a link to the issues of the character and feel motivated to help out and try to make a difference. Zak discovered that in order for a story to reach an audience at such a deep level, there needs to be some kind of tension and “if the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters” (hbr.org). Stories promote empathy and shape perspective by finding a way to get the audience interested in the life of another