Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
the novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important.
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
