Analysis Of Tom Blunt's This Is How Literary Fiction Teaches Us To Be Human

People interact and communicate with one another everyday to accomplish simple task. However interacting with others is hard because of interpretation. Even if communication is key, it is how a person interprets the message and respond back. Empathy helps people understand one another and make communication easier, without hurting one’s feelings. In “This is How Literary Fiction Teaches Us to Be Human” by Tom Blunt, the author believes that literature teaches empathy because it helps with social anxiety, viewing events from a different perspective, and helps experience other people’s feelings before actually talking to them.
Social anxiety is the fear of social situations that involves interaction with other people. Without literary fiction,

a person cannot develop social skills that would help them talk to others. It will become a struggle and make it difficult for them to talk because they would be afraid and do not know what to do in daily situations. The same situation will happen to others who do not have social anxiety because they will not know how to talk to a person with social anxiety and could possibly hurt their feelings. “Judy Blume’s Blubber, a queasy masterpiece of social anxiety” is a book that could help people see the point of view of a person who has social anxiety and could help others to develop empathy. This would help people interact with others who have social anxiety without making them feel terrible because they were able to experience social anxiety in a book beforehand.
The literary books do not always have to be about social anxiety because there are more literary fiction books with other problems, beside social anxiety. “Viewing events from someone else’s perspective, following along as they suffer, makes mistakes, and are forced into hard decisions that affect others beyond themselves.” The books can also show everyday problems from a first person point of view and the reader can experience it as if they are in the book. This could help people develop feelings that will make them able to talk to others because they felt that they also have experience the problem themselves.
The problem is” … if you don’t read the books, you don’t obtain these benefits.” A person who does not read will not be able to experience any problems. Without any experience, a person could communicate with others bluntly and could hurt others feelings. This would be a problem to future generations because they do not read that much and it would be hard to talk to one another with their feelings. WIth miscommunications, it will be hard for people to talk to one another because they will develop trust issues. Fortunately, this pathway can be prevented by kids reading more literary books to expand their knowledge on empathy. Therefore the writer believes that literary books teaches empathy because it can help with social anxiety, showing a different perspective and can be beneficial for future generations.