Fiction Analysis

Theory of Mind is described that “our ability to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires. Thus, we engage in mind-reading when we ascribe to a person a certain mental state on the basis of her observable action; when we interpret our own feelings based on our proprioceptive awareness; when we intuit a complex state of mind based on a limited verbal description” (Zunshine, 2006). This theory is applied to structure the fiction.

At the beginning of the fiction, it narrated that Lisa was going to get married with Sophie’s ex-boyfriend John; however, Sophie was just broke up with John three days ago. In that case, the audience would judge Lisa as a person who was so mean by her behavior, because according to people’s moral sense, it is not good to marry best friend’s just-broke-up ex-boyfriend. As the story developed, the audience’s judgments towards Lisa would change. The audience would think that Lisa was a good friend who wished best and tried her best to help Sophie to find happiness back because she played a little trick to pull the couple back together. Zunshine also suggested that when we read fiction, we always reinforce ourselves to tend to first make interpretations of behaviors reflecting characters’ thoughts (Zunshine, 2006). It is why I use flashback by narrating the conversation between Lisa and Sophie about Lisa’s getting married at the beginning of the story; and then narrates later why that happens. The audience must judge Lisa first at the opening of the story, and the judgment must change as the story developed more and more, giving the audience a feeling of roller coaster, which makes the fiction more interesting to read.

“Our metarepresentational ability allows us to store certain information/representations ‘under advisement’”, Zunshine stated in her book (Zunshine, 2006). So, although Sophia gave Lisa the incorrect information which was that she would never get back together with John, Lisa neither totally accepted nor ignored the information. Actually, she stored the information as a reference to make a judgment. The judgment was that based on Lisa her own experience and knowledge about Sophia and John, she knew that at Sophia’s bottom of heart, she still loved John and wanted to be with John forever.

Moreover, Zunshine also tells that the relationship between theory of Mind and metarepresentationality is that “the ability to form metarepresentations initially evolved to handle the problems of modeling other minds or the inferential tasks attendant to communication” (Zunshine, 2006). That’s why after understanding what happened and the real thoughts of John and Sophia, Lisa came to John and offer advise to try her best to makeup her best friend’s relationship.

Under my manipulation on the development of fiction, the audience would have a wrong image of Lisa’s personality; and at the end the audience would have