Narrative Empathy in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24197/8ct3xr29Keywords:
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, narrative empathy, affect theory, fictional memoirAbstract
Empathy plays a key role in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000), a complex novel consisting primarily of the fictional memoir of Iris Chase, its eighty-two-year-old protagonist and first-person narrator. Working within the theoretical framework of Suzanne Keen’s research on narrative empathy, the aim of this article is twofold: to examine the representation of empathy in The Blind Assassin and to explore the capacity of the novel to encourage readerly empathy towards a character who is frank enough to acknowledge that she has not provided the emotional support expected from her, and bitterly regrets her destructive lack of affective empathy.
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