The Pretend Theory: A Psychological Analysis

In order to make this reflection as honest as I can, I’m going to have to reveal that my beliefs and idea on reading do not synchronize with those of Perrine and thus it is difficult to incorporate her advice and provide an unbiased reflection that does not conflict with the author's analytical interpretations. What is perhaps the punchline of the text states, “Immature readers seek only escape. Even when they think they are reading for interpretation or some useful moral, they insist that what they read return them always some pleasant or exciting image of the world or some flattering image of themselves” (Perrine 2). While the previous quote may not be completely applicable to me because the text was assigned, I can see myself getting lost within the text and with that, my interpretations. Had I perhaps distanced myself and not been allowed to get “lost” in the text then I would have provided an interpretation for the assigned novels with less emotional bias in it. Perrine then goes onto say an immature reader tends to “make fixed demands of every story and feel frustrated and disappointed unless these demands are satisfied. Often they stick to one type of subject matter” (Perrine 3). While I cannot see any educated individual following this, perhaps to some extent I may have allowed an untidy ending to fix my feelings toward a novel to be relatively

An empathy theory is different ways that offer psychological explanations of empathy as being not only a persons capacity to share their emotions with others but also their ability to engage emotively with the world and the people around them and with the intentions underlying art, music and literature. A few of these theories come from;

This happens due to the high imaginative activity while empathizing to fiction. Thus, after reading and analyzing all three parts of this paper it becomes clear that Neill does not research the issue of the empathetic relation to fiction in order to prove the empathy being prior to sympathy; however he wants to show us the veritable value of empathetic responses to the film fiction, which is our emotional education.

“Happiness is in the enjoyment of man’s chief good. Two conditions of the chief good: 1st, Nothing is better than it; 2nd, it cannot be lost against the will” (Augustine 264-267). As human

Thus, Walton chose to suffer, rather than head back home. Because these characters had choices, the reader's sympathy for them decreases.

     There is a pervasive notion in fiction that the work must have a happy ending. That

Nevertheless, he reaps a rather grim harvest. His story does do an excellent job of expressing the concept of paradox in human nature and gives an interesting comparison of the his own romantic ideas and the Puritan culture he describes. Nevertheless, while subplots meander and join, the main story arc suffers from a depressingly predictable, and predictably depressing, development.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one. ”(George R.R. Martin) This quote shows that when you read a book, you will relate it to your life and the book may have a solution that makes you live a longer and a better life. All authors will have a lesson or a value we can use or follow but the reader needs to decide if the values are valuable for them.

Although different emotions sprout different response, Smith argues that people’s cannot go beyond their own selves and therefore use personal conceptions to judge others’ sentiments of joy or grief. Smith states that although we can sympathy with others’ emotion, we cannot truly go beyond our own personal experience and preconception because “it is by the imagination only that we can for any conception of what he suffers” (1). Therefore, although one may sympathy with others’ feelings, people are always limited to their “own person.” Smith explores “there are some passions of which the expressions excite no sort of sympathy” (2) because it may depend on people personal perception or preconceptions. For instance, Smith argues that “the furious

Happiness is a fickle concept and is something every person on this planet seeks out for self-fulfillment. Happiness also gives our lives a sense of perfection. Everyone is in the pursuit of happiness, but not all will find it with guarantee. Happiness can occur at any point in someone’s life, depending on the circumstance or what the individual desires greatly. However, happiness does not come and should not arise from materialistic values. James Hamblin uses the rhetorical devices of ethos, pathos, and logos to promote this theory of how happiness is achieved in “Buy Experiences, Not Things” to show the reader that there is more to life than materialistic values.

In addition, both touch on the topic of absolute happiness and its connection to existentialism, both sharing a somewhat grim look on the subject matter. First of all, absolute happiness “implies total and all consuming happiness. You are nothing but happy all the time, and as such have no understanding of other counter feelings.”[1],

Now happiness, more than anything else, seems complete without qualification. For we always choose it because of itself, never because of something else. Honor, pleasure, understanding, and every virtue

In his work Neill implies that the emotions we feel during either reading or watching fiction should be demarcated into two basic categories: empathy and sympathy. According to this concept “with sympathetic response, in feeling for another, one’s response need not reflect what the other is feeling, nor indeed does it depend on whether the other is feeling anything at all”. In contrast “in responding empathetically to another I come to share his feelings, to feel with him; if he is in an emotional state, to empathize with him is to experience the emotion(s) that he experiences” (Neill, 247). The further deep analysis of different cases of empathy-sympathy differentiation leads Neill to making an argument on the significance of the empathetic responses. According to his point of view, the empathetic responses occupy a significant place in our understanding of fiction, thus, while watching a fictional movie like our example, the audience should respond empathetically to the different situations in it.

D’Arms and Jacobson call this phenomenon the instability problem of affect, and they wrote the

I like to read stories that have good endings, but some of the finest lessons we can learn come from stories with unhappy endings.