Fiction, Beneficial or Unbeneficial? How It Affects Readers’ Ways of Feeling

Reading fiction is considered as a pleasurable activity that many people are still questioning the benefit of it. In fact, reading fiction such as novels, short stories, comics, etc could give plenty of advantages for the brain and also human’s emotion. Many people may think that reading fiction is just for joy, wasting time, and better to read academic books. However, reading fiction is proven to help the readers improve their critical thinking, their empathy and many more.

In some genres of fiction, the writer tends to put some hidden meaning for the reader to be able to find it in order to understand the full story. It caused the reader to use their critical thinking for guessing what the hidden meaning is. Moreover, by reading fiction, the readers could widen their mind, help them to be able to see something from a wider point of view as fiction sometimes lets the readers make their own perception toward its moral value or the hidden meaning of each scene that is written.

Apart from being more critical in thinking, reading fiction mainly affects the reader’s emotions actively. Through reading fiction, readers tend to feel what the emotion portrays inside the story they read. Thus, they will also feel hurt when the characters inside the story are being hurt, they can feel the tension for every situation that happens in the story. Those help the readers to enhance their emotion toward their society. People who read fiction are considered more sensitive toward the other because they could put themselves in others’ positions even though they might have not experienced the same thing as other people. Their sensitivity to others comes from their ability to imagine the situation.

Reading fiction might be a passive activity if it’s only seen through the outside. However, it is not true if it’s seen from the side of emotion. Fiction helps people to see anything through many perceptions, and teaches the readers everything they can’t reach in real life. Through fiction, people are brought to the other universe, and learn many things in such an artsy way.

 

Writer : Ismi Nur Wulandari