persuasive

Through his stories, I felt the weight of fear through another person, and in doing so, I learned that stories possess the extraordinary ability to transform sympathy into empathy. 

Stories emphasise the vitalness of narratives in moulding human nature, because their emotional processes are what construct our empathy. Religious parables such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov have endured, because such texts resist simple characterisation. Instead, they compel readers to navigate moral ambiguity and internal conflict, significantly enhancing this Theory of Mind: a theory developed by many psychologists in the late 90s that defines the capacity to attribute thoughts and emotions to others. Thereby, it forces individuals to continuously infer, revise, and inhabit perspectives beyond their own. In this way, storytelling becomes a practice that trains the mind to perform empathy through which artists like you guide us, underscoring its significance in dissolving the boundaries between Self and Other and actively enhancing the qualities that underpin our humanity.

Eventually, I realised that without stories, tragedies of lost Sri Lankan soldiers and civilians become statistics, and the humanity of them risks being forgotten altogether.

Writers underscore the necessity of stories in crafting the traits that constitute our humanity through functioning as epistemological vessels that preserve and stabilise memory via narrative form. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time epitomises this. With its descriptive and affective depth, it is a medium through which such embodied memory is transmitted across individuals and generations. Philosophically, it aligns with Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity, which is a concept that posits that memory is not a static archive but a continuous act of emplotment, where events are organised into coherent stories that give the self temporal unity. Without narrative, memory fragments into disconnected impressions; with it, experience is structured into meaning, highlighting how novelists are so important in writing generational storytelling that sharpens our human nature.

Every time the war had been historically told, they seemed to return something that had been stolen from the Tamils: their humanity, making me realise that stories are instruments of justice. 

Creators champion the vitalness of stories in shaping our humanity by operating as instruments that expose, contest, and destabilise systems of injustice. Toni Morrison’s seminal novel Beloved serves as empirical evidence, integrating Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concept of symbolic power. It reveals how dominant groups maintain control by normalising their worldview as legitimate, rendering inequality invisible. Storytelling disrupts this implicit bias by exposing counter-cyclical narratives, giving narrative authority to marginalised voices and thereby challenging the “doxa” of society. In this sense, you, young writers here today, can reaffirm storytelling as a form of discursive intervention in redefining what is considered just and actively forging the human condition. 

The composers we examine demonstrate that meaning is not peripheral to human existence but integral to it, as they refine our humanity through sustained processes of emotional, and intellectual resonance with their stories. By fostering empathy, conserving memory, and interrogating social inequities, their works illustrate how storytelling influences our self-perception, our connections with others, and our lens of the world. 

As aspiring authors, you are the architects of our humanity. Pick up the pen. Create. Transform. Because the world is awaiting your story.