Empathy In Tuesday Siesta And The Grapes Of Wrath

Empathy is defined as the ability to feel the emotions of another person or character. This ability aids us in forming emotional attachments and being more compassionate with others. Authors, advertisers, and politicians may use our natural ability to empathise to get people to form attachments to characters or sway our opinion. Gabriel García Márquez’s autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, his short story, ‘‘Tuesday Siesta’’ and John Steinbeck’s fiction novel, The Grapes of Wrath, all strive to affect the reader on an emotional level. Both novels try to play to the reader’s empathy in different ways. The excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath uses a story about a family moving to California during the Great Depression and the hardship of acquiring food along the way to appeal to the empathy and compassion of the reader. But even with this saddening narrative, ‘‘Tuesday Siesta’’ and the first chapter of Living to Tell the Tale gives the reader a far more

Each of the two tales uses children differently. In Living to Tell the Tale, the child version of Gabriel García Márquez in the main character who you get to know as somewhat of a real person through the novel. In The Grapes of Wrath, the children are only in the excerpt and do not say or do anything, and are only there to give Mae some redemption when she gives the family candy. On top of the depression story, Living to Tell the Tale is a true story, and a real kid was scared for life from the image of a dead man. In contrast, The Grapes of Wrath is a fiction novel. Knowing that the events of the story didn’t actually happen, coupled with the happy ending, leaves many readers unmoved by the book. Because Márquez fleshed out many of his characters in Living to Tell the Tale and ‘‘Tuesday Siesta,’’ to the point where they seem like actual human beings, his works are much more heart wrenching than Steinbeck’s The Grapes of