The Role Of Empathy In A Little History Of Literature

We need to start with the age-old question; what does it mean to be human? There are dozens of ways to answer this. Being human means that we love and can empathize with one another, that we make mistakes, that we create beauty and can wreak havoc all at the same time, the list goes on and on. For the sake of this paper, we are going to focus on the empathetic aspect of human nature. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, similar to sympathy, but not quite. John Sutherland touches on this topic in his novel A Little History of Literature. He takes it all the way back to the original tragedies performed in Greece. These masterpieces were written by the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and other ancient Greeks. Many people after leaving these performances would be fairly quiet and in a somber mood, reflecting upon what they just saw and emotionally went through. This is to be considered the first time empathy had been brought to the public eye and given a name.

Everyone lives a separate and unique life and that is what makes literature a joy to indulge in. As William Brewer from quora.com puts it, “One thing that literature does is give us individual examples of human experiences, from which we as individuals may extrapolate connections to our own lives, the lives of others, and other works, but no work itself is defining The Human Experience; it is simply a human experience, and it takes a reader to make it something. Literature does not tell you what it means to be human; it tells you what it means to be a particular human, which can help the reader understand what it means to be not