Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” exhibits concepts in Sara Levine’s “The Self on the Shelf” by providing a persona and personality of sass, sensibility, empathy, and compassion, which is channeled through the narrator—a medical actor. Levine firmly states that, “You, [as the reader, should] leave the essay feeling as if you have met somebody. The worse thing an essayist can do is fail to make an impression” (Levine, 159).

Jamison portrays Levine’s concepts of personhood by manipulating or rather “secretly bullying” the reader with the words “I” and “you.” At first, the narrator relies on the use of “I” to tell her story, so that the reader may follow her narrative along. This is presented in the very first opening sentence: “My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick” (Jamison, 1). Here, Levine addresses the importance of using “I”: “In many ways writing is this act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind” (Levine, 160). The narrator wants to make an impression on the reader by imposing herself on other people with the use of “I.”

However, she changes this perspective when she dips out of the narrative diminishing her own voice by relying on the word “you”: “You are a 23-year-old female patient experiencing seizures with no identifiable neurological origin” (Jamison, 2). In this instance, Jamison changes the perspective of the narrative by addressing the audience as “you” in a forceful manner. You, the reader, essentially are forced to embody this particular “23-year-old female patient” and empathize with her as if you were in her shoes. This is the very essence that gives Jamison’s essay a persona.

Moreover, Lavine elaborates on this phenomenon with: “See how the “I” disappears, as if into a large fur coat. First it becomes a “you”” this may be Didion speaking to herself or Didion speaking to the reader. What matters is her choice to detach herself, through pronominal choice, from the person who is behaving badly in her sentence: “You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want,” as if, until now, the naïve reader has been exhausting himself with deceptions” (Levine, 161).

Another method that Jamison utilizes is the art of Italics for an added bonus of emphasis and sass. For instance, the narrator states, “I do things! I want to tell them. I’m probably going to write about this in an essay someday!” in order to added stylistic emphasis and provide an overall tone and voice for the essay as a whole (Jamison, 5). Even more, Levine says, “[Elkin] uses italics, whereas other writers rely on syntax or the reader’s intelligence to get the emphasis across” (Levine, 163). In this case, Jamison chose to use Italics to add to the persona of the narrative to provide an impression for the reader.

In another example, Jamison also uses cross-out marks to tell a story without outright actually saying it. [I will bold the crossed out words.] This is portrayed in: “Patient is here for an abortion for a surgery to burn the bad parts of her heart for a medication to fix her heart because the surgery failed” (Jamison, 23). This method of crossing out words is to add more personality to the narrative by making the narrator seem sassy, empathetic, and compassionate.