Contemporary novels Otroštvo (ang. ‘Childhood’), Jaz sam (ang. ‘Myself alone’), The end of Eddy and The body where I was born were explored by analyzing narrative empathy fueled by emotions evolving during reading, so called narrative emotions. The field of narrative empathy is relatively new in literary science and, in addition to narrative emotions, is also associated with ethics. Opinions differ on the question of whether empathy can carry so much weight in the reading process as to affect readers ’real lives. Such studies are far-reaching and mostly indefinable, so my research is more focused on the thesis that the development of emotions when reading stimulates narrative empathy, which can be a tool for presenting real issues and at the same time the way it is brought closer to the reader because of emotional descriptions. I therefore rely on the role of ethics within literature and in selected novels highlight excerpts from morally contentious situations where emotional intensity is highest, as I believe that negative emotions shake the reader and encourage critical reflection, while positive emotions play a calming role after negative emotional simulation and are complementary to the negative. I analyze narrative techniques that I identify as possible stimulators of narrative emotions and empathy. At the narrative level, I consider the autobiographical nature of the novel, merely hinted at or confirmed; the narrator-child, the narrator-adult, or an intertwining of the two; focalization and speech representation; at the story level, I analyze the concrete derivation of the listed elements of the narrative on the topic of growing up, which I call narrative techniques in the context of research.
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