Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction

Abstract

This essay explores the ethics and aesthetics of George Saunders’s work, and particularly the ways in which his short stories engage the reader in a compassionate relation with the characters. It investigates how Saunders employs a number of narrative techniques to enable an imaginative perspective-shifting that may have a long-term bearing on the reader’s ethical decisions. Drawing on recent theorizing on “narrative empathy,” I argue that despite his inclination toward satire and postmodernist playfulness, Saunders’s style is foremost motivated by his aim to achieve compassion and intersubjective understanding. Saunders’s version of narrative empathy strips off the habitual and thereby makes us sensitive to the experiences and perspectives of others. Taking into account the socio-cultural and literary-historical contexts his short stories are situated in—a shorthand for which would be neoliberalism and postmodernism—I demonstrate how narrative empathy works both at the levels of story and discourse in his short fiction.