One of the functions of literature is to give a moral or lesson about life. The genres of literature that tend to explicitly include morals are fables, parables, myths, folk tales and fairy tales. These stories often represent something larger and teach the reader through the mistakes of the characters in the stories. For example, Bidpai's fable "The Tortoise and the Geese" teaches the reader about being secure in yourself and not letting the opinions of others negatively affect you.
Poetry is often an abstract and implicit form of expression that can require interpretation and repeated readings to understand. It can express deep emotions and beauty through indirect language. Readers might have to interpret the depth of a poet or speaker's feeling through the images and symbols the poet provides. For example, in "Tulips," Sylvia Plath calls the flowers in her hospital room "an awful baby" and "a dozen red lead sinkers round my neck," conveying her own sense of depression and alienation. The use of associations such as these teach people how to think critically about the relationships between things, and how to understand meaning that is not explicitly stated.
While celebrating our uniqueness, literature also reveals our commonalities. Through character and plot, literature shows that we all have weaknesses, conflicts, doubts, problems, failures, growth and accomplishments. This means that no matter how different our values, religion, language, geography, nationality or race may be, we are all connected to one another through the commonalities of the human experience. Literature effectively presents human life not by describing it but through reflecting it. Fiction and drama, for example, show the dynamics of real human relationships through the characters' dialogue.
Literature can also provide a vivid and personal glimpse of history. Stanford University writes that "literature deals not merely in facts or ideas but in the human response to them; it can allow us to know not merely what the men and women of other times and places believed and did but what it felt like to believe and do those things." For example, Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" gives readers an inside view of the harrowing psychological and emotional cost of slavery. Lorraine Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun" gives insight into the economic and personal impact of racism on families in America in the 1950s. Through literature, readers can gain a fuller understanding of historical events and epochs.