From the Emotions of Conversation to the Passions of Fiction

In this chapter I argue that narratives provide contexts to make sense of emotions, by linking emotions to the principal aspect of their meaning – namely goals. In literature a character is a person who has goals and who enacts plans to pursue those goals. Narrative plays an integrative role by relating emotions to a narrative line and attributing them to characters. Fiction contributes to the building of characters by means of emotions. Four aspects of story structure are discussed, and it is shown how they elicit emotions in the reader, but also how they enable us to understand emotions.