In Sympathy with Narrative Characters

Sympathetic responses to characters are a pervasive form of narrative engagement, and they contribute importantly to what makes perceiving a narrative a rewarding experience. Yet, the notion of sympathy has received relatively little attention in contemporary philosophy of art, especially when compared to the lively debates surrounding the notion of empathy.1 Here, I propose an analysis of sympathy that addresses the notion’s complex structure, one that enjoys several explanatory advantages in understanding our responses to others. Sympathy will prove to be a multifaceted phenomenon, one deserving an even more thorough investigation than offered here. However, it will amount to progress if my analysis succeeds in isolating a paradigmatic mechanism of engagement—call it “paradigmatic sympathy” or “sympathy proper” or, for short, “sympathy”—such that a number of responses that are commonly called “sympathetic” can be understood as being in various ways akin to it. My topic is sympathy as a broad mechanism of one’s engagement with another, hereafter also the “target” of the response, where the other is responded to with favor (while we can dub antipathy the mechanism by which one responds to another’s experience and situation with disfavor).2 It is not sympathy as an emotion, as when the term is used interchangeably with such terms as ‘pity,’ ‘sorrow,’ ‘tenderness,’ and so forth. Sympathetic responders in the sense relevant here may feel any one of a wide range of emotions, depending on the situation affecting their target: not just pity, but also happiness, anger, disappointment, and so forth. Hence, I submit, we respond sympathetically not just when we pity Desdemona as she tries in vain to persuade Othello of her loyalty and love, but also when we feel happy for Superman as he succeeds in reviving Lois Lane, or when we feel a complex entanglement of emotions for Willy Loman as he ends his life. Largely for this reason, what follows will include little critique of other accounts, since most of them look at sympathy as an emotion or a set of emotions. By contrast, my proposal on sympathy as a mechanism of engagement, if successful, will provide us with a criterion to identify a wide range of responses as sympathetic.3