Empathy In The Canterbury Tales

When someone tells a story it can be for several reasons, to inform, to entertain, or to communicate. The Canterbury tales, a fictitious collection of stories written,by Geoffrey Chaucer, depicts its main characters values and personalities through the stories they tell. Humans of New York, a project started by Brandon Stanton, asks people to share real stories about themselves and these stories can be incredibly powerful, often leading to readers facing a fact that they may not always want to believe, everyone is human and go through the same emotions and struggles as they do. Our class experienced this for ourselves, learning our peer’s stories and in turn sharing our own. Our project with Narrative four, however, took it a step further

Going through the Humans of Swain County I experienced giving my story to my partner to the class to hear; being involved in narrative four though, was much different. Empathy is something a person feels when they know what you’re going through, when they have been in your shoes or shared a similar experience. Empathy is a much more intimate experience than sympathy, simply because anyone can say they are sorry, but not everyone experiences the same things. In Humans of Swain High the fact that everyone experiences life differently was made blatantly clear, especially as those who I assumed had perfect lives showed that they didn’t. Humans of Swain High did stir up empathy for me, yet it was through Narrative Four that I saw that empathy could have several different levels. In Narrative Four we did not necessarily share with the class, even though the stories were told to everyone, instead they were given to our partners. Our partners told our stories, ones that defined us, or impacted us, from our point of view, going so far as to introduce themselves as us. The result for me was very surreal, it felt as if the story was no longer truly mine. Part of that was in a way therapeutic,allowing me to view the story from a different angle and in a sense, let