David Foster Wallace, renowned short story writer, once said:

"I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of 'generalization' of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone in the inside. It might just be that simple."

Stephen Apkon further emphasizes Wallace's statement by explaining the idea that stories are a way of "relieving the inevitable suffering that is part of the human experience" and that mirror neurons, for now, is what we have in the world.