The Empathy Exams

Jamison begins with the “first function” in which she describes living in Nicaragua and teaching Spanish to young children. She integrates herself into the culture despite her outlier status, accepting the ways she is othered by the locals in an affectionate way. Jamison then states that “I never know how to start this story. I just don’t” and introduces the work of Vladimir Propp (70). Propp outlined the classic formatting of fairytales in a book written during the Russian Revolution. Jamison uses this formatting, labeled functions, and skips to the third in which she is told she shouldn’t have been walking home alone at night. She then revisits the second function and notes that while staying in Nicaragua she had not been told not to walk home alone at night—she had been told not to be afraid. Jamison notes that she strived so hard to separate herself from classic American tourists that she endeavored to behave differently. It is here that she reveals she got punched in the face and struggles to understand how the act of violence fits into Prop’s formatting.

Jamison then notes that Propp’s fourth function notes that a villain attempts to deceive the hero, but there was no deception in what happened to her.