We’ve said a lot already about some pretty powerful issues that can’t be ignored in this book. Here, I think I’d like to talk about something that isn’t perhaps as critical to understanding the novel’s implications for our own real, modern world, at first glance or otherwise. I’m interested in how the novel deal with empathy; as a human characteristic, as a potentially gendered characteristic, its sentimentalization (or lack thereof), and the ways that these understandings of empathy might inform society, dystopic or otherwise.