How to Use Empathy in Fiction

empathy, n. 1. the identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, etc. of another. 2. the imaginative ascribing to an object of one's feelings or attitudes. (Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 9th Edition)

Once upon a time, a couple of houses and jobs back, I took a book off my crammed to bursting bookshelf, sat down, and read it for the first time. I'd picked it up at a used book sale, recognizing the title of the book, and thought that I should get it because it was frequently recognized as an important book. I'd never heard the label "great" applied to it, but it had plenty of other adjectives attached, so I took a chance. The novel had one strike against it: part of it had been excerpted into a story I'd read in high school, a story I'd thought was idiotic to the extreme. In any case, I was older and hopefully wiser, and ready to forgive the book that particular section.

So, as I said, I sat down and began to read. It took me several hours of the course of two or three days to finish it, but the amazing thing was there wasn't any lapse of emotion in-between those times. Each time I picked it up, I was just as horrified, just as enraged, working under the same lightning-strike epiphany that hit me about a third of the way through: this book was true in the sense of the universal reality we all want to capture in our work, not in the more mundane sense of having actually happened. This character, though I'd never seen the conditions or experienced the hellish conditions that were his life, spoke to me and showed me what he felt, what he thought. Despite our vast differences, we had things in common, ideas we could share, and that made the novel all the harder to take. When I finished, it felt like the aftermath of rage.

That novel was Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I haven't read it since; I probably will never read it again. Some things in life you don't need to experience twice, because the first time doesn't leave you. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of books I've read in my life, Invisible Man is one of the few that I truly consider great, and the reason for that can be summed up as empathy.