Literary Fiction and Empathy

Reading Literary Fiction changes things for the reader a lot in my opinion. For me personally, I find literary fiction quite boring and hard to follow, but the internal messages and lessons that I learn is why I also like literary fiction. Literary fiction allows the reader to make the decision and forces the reader to work its mind. For example, in Hamlet, I as the reader, am forced to question whether Hamlet feels anger and frustration towards his mother or resentment and betrayal. The author is not coming out and giving the emotions that the character will feel, the reader must infer what is happening. This helps many people because it is like they are practicing for real life situations. I believe that people can do better on the tests, in which the article is talking about, because they can practice the skills they need in real life while reading. Instead of putting themselves into the situation and seeing how they would react or what they would do, the reader is now trying to figure out how to read other people, which is very difficult at times. For example, in the Hamlet it is hard to read Hamlet or the other character's emotions because of the language and techniques the author uses. I believe the tricks that the author puts in the story to create the confusion within the reader resembles real life events or happenings that cause confusion when reading someones emotions. Like she is frowning, yet her face looks so relaxed. Well is she calm or angry. I find this article to be very accurate in that literary fiction can help readers with reading emotions and so forth. It's like practicing for softball every day, or in this case reading the literary fiction, and then playing the game, or reading someones real emotions in life. In all, this seems to be something that should be more recognized because it may be of benefit to some people. Although many people do not like literary fiction, it can be a great learning experience in which the reader is actively engaged with decision making on important topics of the book.