Narrative Empathy as Animator of the Inanimate

Readers' cocreative, empathic responses are stimulated by characters and by narrators, narratees, implied readers, and authors, who also call upon readers' intercorporeal engagement, inviting transportation and empathy. Driven by Einf & uuml;hlung for inanimate representations or projections of the text, and transmuted through "transomatization," empathic responses may be attributed to the simultaneous (or rapidly interchanging) invitations of an immersive fictional world, its compelling existents, the entrancing voice of the narrator, the impulsions of narrativity, and the reader's self-recognition in one or more of the roles of narrative communication. I illustrate the possibilities by discussing Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "Feathertop: A Moralized Legend" (1852).