ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors investigate if they were right, and present some other questions related to how animal stories are told, or to their discursive characteristics. They explain the hypothesis that the impact of Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe might have been dependent on the first-person narrative techniques they employed, and provide experimental data indicating if that hypothesis is sound. The authors describe not any first-person narrator, but a first-person dramatized narrator, who is also the main protagonist of the story he or she tells. Imaging technology showed that when they filled out the items about the person they previously wrote about in first-person voice, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was activated to a significantly greater extent than when they completed items about the other individual. Crime and Punishment is one of those rare works of literature which might be said to have endured the test of time, and can therefore be considered truly great.
