This thesis is an emotional analysis of three arbitrarily selected anti-war novels of the 20th and 21st centuries. The goal is to determine how emotional narratives shape the characterization of literary characters, how much such constructs influence the ethical reflection of texts, and how important emotional narratives are in shaping anti-war messages. To more clearly investigate the subject anti-war corpus, the paper first deals with the connection between literature and emotions with a special emphasis on the cognitive-cultural approach to emotions, as a broader framework of the emotional approach to literature. Emotional narratives in character characterization in Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms (1995), Meša Selimović's Magla i mjesečina (1972) and Mate Ćurić's Zenga (2018) will be analyzed through the procedures and techniques presented in Suzanne Keen's theory of narrative empathy and the empathic-ethical model of literary readings by Martha C. Nussbaum. Three texts from different national literatures, from different time periods and different war events, will be comparatively analyzed using the methodology of affective narratology with the aim of discovering the narrative techniques used by authors to create emotional narratives, which represent a key element in the reader's identification, but also encourage narrative empathy as part of the characterization of literary characters in anti-war novels.