What does a terrorist want? Empathising and sympathising with terrorist voices

Abstract

This paper poses the question of what it means to be ‘inside’ the terrorist’s mind and explore the terrorist’s mentality by means of a narrative, such as the terrorist novel and the terrorist memoir. Consequently, the paper focuses on authorial strategies of empathy and sympathy in texts that privilege the terrorist character’s subjective viewpoint and experience. The discussion operates on the premise that narrative techniques have bearing on the readers’ response to the story, even if it there is no guaranteed correspondence between a certain technique and a certain effect. Thus, the paper asks how first-person narration, the interior representation of a person’s consciousness, and extended direct representation of speech, can contribute to empathic and sympathetic effects in specific ways. After a brief look on the ironic method, i.e. alternation between ironic distance and sympathy for the terrorist character, and the narrative of changing minds, i.e. a story where a character abandons his plot for destruction, the discussion moves into an extended analysis of three examples where the narrative as a whole suggests sympathy for terrorist cause and tactics. The examples include Yukio Mishima’s novel Runaway Horses (Honba 1969), Richard Jackson’s dialogue novel Confessions of a Terrorist (2014), and Omar Nasiri’s memoir Inside the Global Jihad (2006).