“So much of Gandhi stays within you after finishing, that it is as if the book never ended”. Empathetic engagement and rhetoric in the story of my experiments with truth

With his abiding insistence that humankind learn to identify with one another, regardless of colour, race or creed, Gandhi is perceived by many as the epitome of empathy. His autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth was written as a moral guide to others, to assist them in their endeavours to tread a lifelong path of truth. Empathy, that ability to feel with others, is one of the central tenets of Gandhi’s doctrine and many readers report empathetic engagement with the text. Certain narrative techniques are thought to be particularly effective in the evocation of empathy in readers, and, through the deployment of corpus stylistic analysis, both their presence in the text and their potential rhetorical efficacy will be investigated.