ABSTRACT
As in everyday life, we rarely empathize with villains in fiction. At least, this holds true for many vice characters like Shakespeare's Jago or other stereotyped fictive villains like Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts. However, we do find some prominent villains in literature who differ from those mentioned above. Take Tom Ripley as an example: though being a coward and a malicious murderer, he is still an object of readerly empathy. How can this be explained? In this chapter, it is claimed that there are certain literary techniques that can be held responsible for that. More specifically, this chapter focuses on the interplay between evaluative text elements and different ways of referring to emotions of characters. It is argued that the emotional impact of a literary character, at least in part, depends on the combination of these techniques within a certain work of literature. As readers are exposed to these techniques and these exclusively, in cases like Highsmith's novel it is hard to completely avoid empathy even for villainous creatures like Tom Ripley.
