An introduction is distinguished from a beginning. The intersection of empathy and literature in this work takes its commitment from empathy, not from hermeneutics; from empathy, not from cognitive science (or cognitive literary criticism); from empathy, not from deconstruction; and so on. Empathy is always empathy and radical empathy applies the same four aspects of relatedness—receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. Without bringing the capacity for empathic receptivity to the text, neither the experiences available in the narrative nor the affective dynamics of the lyric would make sense to the reader. The point is a conceptual, not an empirical one (and elaborated in detail in Chap. 2 ). Radical empathy emerges from standard empathy, when standard empathy fails in the face of empathic distress of the kind called forth by moral trauma, double-binds, soul murder, and tragic circumstances. “Connecting the dots” between tragedy and empathy, a double-bind is a source of tragedy, but is not alone sufficient to generate tragedy. For if one remains with the double-bind, one gets “ruin and wreck,” not tragedy. Moral trauma is the “more” required to turn “wreck and ruin” into tragedy. “Moral trauma” is defined preliminarily. Nietzsche is called as a witness against Plato in defense of tragedy, and the thought experiment of the Trolley Car Dilemma is introduced as an intuition pump (Dennett) to generate intuitions about empathy and tragic literature. Standard empathy is challenged to become radical empathy in encountering empathic distress, trauma, and tragedy.