I even considered, by way of a somewhat feeble tribute, submitting a blank page - a sheet of brilliant white that would perfectly encapsulate my inarticulate reverence (Johnson, I should explain, once used pages shaded from grey to black to communicate the experience of a character's heart attack, a device he adapted from his beloved Tristram Shandy).
Just because the experience of a character is fictional doesn't mean they are not real for the fans.
The story is seen through the experiences of a single character, in this book, Jeff Hinkley.
They are no longer one's own experiences, but those of a character in a bildungsroman in one's own head.
But as a theater artist she prefers looking at the whole canvas to taking a "deep dive" into the experience of a single character.
The PT subscale assesses the tendency to adopt the psychological viewpoint of others, and the FS subscale assesses the tendency to transpose oneself into the experience of a fictitious character; these two scales were designed to measure the cognitive component of empathy.
In the most extreme examples of the reader knowing more than the investigator, we twice experience the death of a character, who is being murdered, from his or her point of view.
It was the first book in which I experienced the death of a character; I don't think I'd understood such a thing was even possible and I know I couldn't have managed Little Women, much less the relentless Tess of the D'urbervilles, all those years later if Charlotte's Web hadn't toughened me up.
Seeing that yellow canary, hearing that clear Middle C on a Steinway piano, smelling the sharp odor of anise, feeling a pain of the jab of the doctor's needle in receiving an injection — these types of conscious experience have a character of what-it-is-like, a character informed by conceptual content that is also "felt", on this view.
The other tales in this book, however, circumnavigate the globe, demonstrating Mr. Le's astonishing ability to channel the experiences of a multitude of characters, from a young child living in Hiroshima during World War II to a 14-year-old hit man in the barrios of Medellín to a high school jock in an Australian beach town.
