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Narrative Empathy in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
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Narrative Empathy in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
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Journal Article
Narrative Empathy in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
2025
Overview
Empathy plays a key role in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000), a complex novel consisting primarily of the fictional memoir of Iris Chase, its eighty-two-year-old protagonist and first-person narrator. Working within the theoretical framework of Suzanne Keen’s research on narrative empathy, the aim of this article is twofold: to examine the representation of empathy in The Blind Assassin and to explore the capacity of the novel to encourage readerly empathy towards a character who is frank enough to acknowledge that she has not provided the emotional support expected from her, and bitterly regrets her destructive lack of affective empathy. La empatía ejerce un papel crucial en The Blind Assassin (2000), una compleja novela de Margaret Atwood constituida principalmente por unas memorias de ficción cuya protagonista y narradora es la octogenaria Iris Chase. Este artículo, elaborado dentro del marco teórico de Suzanne Keen sobre la empatía narrativa, tiene un doble objetivo: estudiar la representación de la empatía en The Blind Assassin y analizar la capacidad de la novela para promover la empatía lectora con un personaje que reconoce con franqueza no haber aportado el apoyo emocional que se esperaba de ella y lamenta amargamente su falta de empatía afectiva.
