Reading fiction can help you to understand others because you're imagining people's facial expressions as a situation is happening. Because so much is left up to the readers to figure out, we can apply those skills to real life. If you go people watching, you can sometimes come up with a pretty good idea of what's going on with the person over there who doesn't look very happy, even if you can't hear what they're saying. People give away a lot with their facial expressions even though they aren't trying to.
But when a piece of lit doesn't give you clues as to someone's facial expressions like in...oh, say.. Hamlet, for example, it's up to the actor (if it's a play) to interpret it as they will. If it's a book, then again, it's up to the reader to imagine what the character looks like given the details of the situation. Reading the dialogue and understanding the situation can give us an idea of what the character is feeling, so that's when we start to understand other people in real life. We see things from their point of view. In Hamlet, we may never understand why Gertrude hastily married Claudius after a happy union with Hamlet, but we can definitely see why Hamlet Jr. isn't happy about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment