Empathy In I Am The Messenger

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“A brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal… That’s the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning” (Breakfast Club). This quote, said by the character Brian Johnson in the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club, shows that assumptions about people can be very wrong. People often assume things about others whom they hardly know anything about and then base their judgements of that person off their assumptions. Others, however, get to know people before judging them and from there on, base their judgements. Empathy is a crucial trait in people to avoid judgements, to get to know people better and to become a more caring person. Empathy can help people not to judge others before getting to know them. In the 1985 hit movie,…show more content…
The book I am the Messenger, by Marcus Zusak, is a perfect example of how empathy can help people become caring. In this book, there is a woman who constantly gets raped by her husband. The main character, Ed, dislikes this woman because she’s snobby, up until he realizes that she uses her attitude as a defense mechanism against people she meets on the street out of fear that they’ll harm her. In the book Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, the main character gets stranded on an island all alone. At first, she is very hurt that the people of her tribe left her, but then she realizes that they couldn’t have waited for her, or they would’ve missed their opportunity at a new life. She then becomes more understanding towards them because she knows they did what they had to in order to survive. The Martian, by Andy Weir is a story about a botanist who gets stranded on Mars. He realizes that it wasn’t his crew mate’s faults because they thought he had died, and if they’d stayed around to check, they would’ve died too. He knows they didn’t leave him by choice and he sees their reasoning behind their actions. In conclusion, having empathy towards people can help one become more understanding as
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