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Raymond Carver's A Small, Good Thing portrays affective and cognitive empathy feelings between the characters. The narrative presents affective discourse in two situations. The protagonist Ann's empathy with her husband and with a Negro family enables her to communicate with them through sharing their mental states. Likewise, the narrative represents two situations in which cognitive empathy is generated. Dr. Francis's awareness about Ann's mental state alleviates her suffering. Additionally, when, at the narrative's end, Ann and her husband tell the baker the news of their son's death and he tells them his own childless life story, they mutually show cognitive empathy toward each other through identification of their mental states. My essay argues that engagement with evoked cognitive and affective empathy feelings between the characters in Carver's story is likely to generate narrative reader's cognitive empathy. Carver's narrative has the potential to elicit a reader's cognitive empathy through manipulation of the narrative perspective and representation of a familiar emotion, sadness evoked by death, as well as anthropomorphic or human-like reactions to this emotion. Öz Raymond Carver'ın A Small, Good Thing adlı hikâyesi, karakterler arasındaki duyuşsal ve bilişsel empati duygularını betimler. Anlatı, duyuşsal söylemi iki durumda sunar. Öykünün baş kişisi olan Ann'in kocasıyla ve bir Zenci aileyle olan empatisi, zihinsel durumlarını paylaşarak, onlarla iletişim kurmasını sağlar. Aynı biçimde anlatı, iki başka durumda da, bilişsel empatinin kurulmasını ortaya koyar. Dr. Francis'in Ann'in acı çeken zihinsel durumu hakkındaki farkındalığı, Ann'in acısını hafifletir. Bunun yanında, anlatı sonunda Ann ve kocası fırıncıya kendi oğullarının ölüm haberini verip, fırıncının da onlara kendi çocuksuz yaşam öyküsünü anlattığında, zihinsel durumlarını anlama ve farketme yoluyla birbirleri ile bilişsel empati kurarlar. Bu yazıda, Carver'ın öyküsündeki karakterler arasında tetiklenmiş bilişsel ve duyuşsal empati duygularıyla etkileşim kurmanın, anlatı okuyucusununda bilişsel empati oluşturacağı öne sürülmektedir. Carver'ın öyküsü, anlatı perspektifinin manipüle edilmesi ve tanıdık bir duygunun-ölümle tetiklenen hüzünlenmenin-sunulması yoluyla, okuyucunun anlatıdaki duruma karşı insani tepkilerini uyandırıp, onun karakterlerle bilişsel empati kurmasını sağlama potansiyeline sahiptir.

Where's the road to the place where light dwells; darkness, where's it located? Can you take it to its territory; do you know the paths to its house? Job, Common English Bible (38: 19-20) The Road is a novel that seems to dwell entirely in darkness. It begins after some planetlevel devastation has long ago reduced the world to ash. The protagonists, a man and his son, are in a struggle for their lives. They encounter cannibalism, slavery, cold-blooded acts of violence. Cormac McCarthy's narrative is as stark and cold as is his plot; this is fiction that cuts to the bone. Engaged so elementally with matters of life and death, The Road makes a case for itself as a classically naturalistic novel. The environment thwarts the characters. Chance dictates almost every encounter. Characters beg for God with no expectation that he will show up. The bleakness of this novel, keeping step as it does with other recent American novels, is in part what prompted Paul Elie to argue that fiction has "lost its faith." For a country where millions of people profess faith in Jesus Christ, he argues, our literary fiction is strikingly and incongruently post-Christian. In our fiction, Christian belief figures "somewhere between a dead language and a hangover." There's language that echoes the transcendent, but has no confidence in it. McCarthy and Don DeLillo feel like prophets, "but Christianity in their work is a country for old men" (Elie). Elie is not alone. Amy Hungerford, in her book Postmodern Belief (2010), reads McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) as a prime example of a larger trend in American fiction of drawing on biblical language to give the book the feeling of scripture's moral authority, when the book's actual authority is merely aesthetic. "We are left," says Hungerford, "with the presumptuous creation of a prose that sounds like scripture, tempts one to read (for metaphysical structures) as if one were reading scripture, and yet withholds all but the aesthetic and sentimental effects of scripture. In this sense, McCarthy has written, in Blood Meridian, a sentimental novel of the highest order" (95). The Road fares no better.

Modern views of poetry tend to concord with Wallace Stevens’s insistence that “God and the imagination are one,” assuming that the only meaning there is in the natural world is that which the poet makes. But Denise Levertov held instead that the poet’s word is a response to the beauty of the world as given by God, and that the poet’s task is to invite the reader to resonate with that experience. Drawing on current research from neurocognitive poetics that indicates how readers experience beauty in language, this essay seeks to demonstrate how Levertov’s poem, “O Taste and See,” embodies an invitation for the reader to engage one’s senses in the discovery of God through the beauty of poetry and created being.

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