Literary Fiction and Empathy

By reading  a work of fiction, it allows a person's mind to wander and come up with their own thoughts along the way. Fiction is obviously a piece of work that has been made up, but most of the time contains elements that are intertwined in a person's daily life or something that they've gone through. Fiction can help a person understand somebody else by interpreting the story they've read and inputting it into a specific scenario. In a way it seems easier to understand somebody else by having examples of other peoples work to go off of. Rather than non fiction pieces where the answers are already lying in the book, and there's no way to think around it or make up your own ending because what you are already reading is true. Fiction gives us the freedom to explore our emotions on our own and allows us to deal with our social skills in real world situations better than we think we can. In Hamlet, Hamlet goes through a lot of internal struggles that makes me question what kind of person he is. If he is going to follow through with some of the actions he is wanting to do. Hamlet shows different emotions when he's put into different situations that show me he is lost but knows what he's supposed to do.