In Sympathy with Narrative Characters.

The article focuses on the aesthetics of people's sympathetic responses as opposed to their empathetic responses when they engage with narratives. The author argues that empathy is how the audience feels some part of a character's emotions as if they were their own. However, sympathy involves the audience responding with their own emotions to a character's situation. The article also considers anticipatory sympathy, conditional sympathy, and sympathy by proxy. A discussion of how audiences can adopt a protagonist's targets, goals, and desires as their own is presented.