The Thing Around Your Neck

In “The thing around your neck” Adichie invites empathy onto the speaker in a multitude of ways. One way she invites empathy is by changing the personal pronoun from I to you. This helps with empathy because it draws you into the story and the reader can see themselves in the place where the reader in. This also helps with empathy because it’s a way for the speaker to detach from their real life. The detachment shows that the speaker isn’t pleased with what went on and how it affected her. Furthermore, Adichie invites empathy by showing a great contrast from the US and Nigeria having the speaker embarrassed of their home country. They refer to Nigeria as a place where someone would “gawk at the lives of poor people” yet was never embarrassed by the US saying they “won the American visa lottery”. This feeling of embarrassment is something that everyone can relate to and by blatantly putting the embarrassment in different sections of the story it attracts empathy because feeling embarrassed is an emotion everyone has felt at one point in time.