"The novel is the best way to explore the complex depths of human nature"

Kadare’s assertion elevates the novel not merely as entertainment but as a cognitive instrument, an art form uniquely suited to map the subterranean layers of motive, memory, and contradiction. Unlike philosophy’s abstractions or psychology’s classifications, narrative can follow a consciousness as it swerves, stalls, rationalizes, and self-deceives. The novel’s capaciousness, its tolerance for silence, digression, and ambiguity, mirrors the way people actually think and feel. It accommodates multiple temporalities, letting the past intrude on the present and the imagined future color immediate choices, thus reproducing the braided texture of inner life.

Because novels stage encounters among perspectives, they reveal how human nature is relational. A character is never merely an individual; they are a node in social, historical, and moral webs. Polyphonic storytelling allows competing truths to coexist without being flattened into a single verdict. Ambivalence can remain intact. Shame, love, cruelty, and redemption can be traced across scenes rather than pinned to a page like specimens. The form’s slowness matters too; reading asks for time, and time permits ethical attention. In that attention, empathy becomes an act of discovery rather than a sentimental reflex.

Kadare’s own background underscores another dimension. Writing under dictatorship, he used allegory and myth to smuggle political and psychological insights past censors. The novel’s obliqueness, its ability to say two things at once, becomes a shield and a scalpel, cutting through official narratives while protecting the teller. That doubleness testifies to a deeper claim: human nature is most truthfully approached at an angle.

Finally, the novel enlists the reader as co-creator. Gaps, unreliable narrators, and shifting frames demand inference. Meaning is not dispensed; it is assembled. That participatory labor mirrors self-knowledge itself, which is provisional, revisable, and plural. Other arts illuminate facets of who we are; the novel, by staging consciousness within worlds, assembles the facets into a living whole.