Foxes, red kites and voles become as intricately shaded as characters in an HBO drama, the readers' sympathies swinging between them and their adversaries.
Seton was reportedly denounced by readers for having killed Lobo, only to write about the experience; however, as biographer Brian Morris stated, the readers' sympathies "are directed, as Seton meant them to be, toward the wild animal, rather than against the teller of the tale".
"You could not tell Dean's story, I don't believe, in the first person without losing the reader's sympathy, some essential sympathy," he told me.
Besides, Ms. Kimes's earlier conviction on charges of enslaving her maids pretty much rules out the prospect of reader sympathy.
Plump front-loads the big reveal, the better to garner reader sympathy, which tends to drop a notch every time the author confesses to another of her own four affairs – the first when her marriage was barely a year old.
Over and over again, I found not reader sympathy for the bereaved moms and dads, but judgment of the harshest sort.
"The easiest way to get reader sympathy is to write about people who are innocent," Keller said.
And he isn't drawn to shame the reader into sympathy, either.
Somehow, commendably, Messud retains the reader's sympathy for this powerhouse of loathing.
All this achieves is to arouse the reader's sympathy for X.
