God Created Consciousness in Fiction

Many modern novels do something that the earliest literature sometimes seems incapable of doing—representing the inner life of the individual, in all its complexity. The history of literature has been one of “gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities,” the psycholinguist Julie Sedivy observes in her recent Nautilus feature “Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?” 

Characters in ancient literature, in other words, often appear more as ciphers than people, as abstract archetypes rather than as recognizable humans.

See how Gustave Flaubert, in his 1856 novel , describes an internal state: “It wasn’t the first time in their lives that they had