have been created by some gifted women driven to exasperation by the good men
in their lives seemingly hell bent on sabotaging their potential as men. I do not
know.

I do know that many other readers whom I have encountered besides myself
find themselves responding with sympathy to the male protagonists portrayed in
this collection. While many of these male and female readers are highly educated
in the conventions of literary interpretation, some are not. Most, however, seem to
manifest, like myself, many of the traits of "constructed knowing" described by
Mary Field Belenky and her colleagues in Women's Ways of Knowing (131-52).
As such, their responses to these stories and poems are highly informed by
empathy as defined by Nel Noddings -- i.e., empathy as "reception," rather than
"projection." Describing herself as an empathetic knower, Noddings says: "I
receive the other into myself, and I see and feel with the other" (30). Seeing and
feeling "with the other" have led many readers of the works collected here to
perceive the male protagonists they portray as meriting sympathy. Is this the only
way of interpreting these stories and poems? By no means. As great works of art,
they lend themselves to a variety of interpretations that deepen our wisdom about
the human experience.

The process in readers of seeing and feeling with literary characters is generally
guided by narrative conventions, as well as by the conventions of literary
interpretation. Thus, when a reader encounters a character who is described
approvingly or in beautiful, lyrical language or with gentle humor, that reader is
more inclined to feel friendly toward that character. Similarly, characters whose
painful feelings we are told a great deal about and whose sufferings are openly
commiserated with and/or related in great detail generally evoke our sympathy. In
addition, we often find ourselves caring more about characters who are esteemed
and/or anguished over by other characters we admire. Likewise, when we
encounter characters who are associated with lyrically described settings, as
M'sieur Michel in "After the Winter," we often find ourselves feeling more kindly
about them and their dilemmas. The same is true of characters who are linked with
figures who historically command respect, as O.E. Parker is with Christ in
"Parker's Back." These are but some of the textual clues that helped prompt
sympathetic responses in me as well as in the colleagues and the many students
with whom I have read these works. In the commentary that precedes each section
in this anthology, I have identified some of these intertextual clues with regard to
each literary work.

In the case of short stories, what also most shapes our response is plot, and most
particularly the way the protagonist resolves his or her dilemma and changes. How
we perceive the protagonist's central predicament and resolution of that
predicament is guided further by our value systems and our understanding of
human psychology. If the protagonist we care about struggles with problems we
recognize other people to have and resolves them in ways that correspond to our
values, we tend to like them even more. As I show in the rest of this introduction,

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