A fundamental purpose of a story is to take life-like events, issues, and characters, and to recreate them in a way that they offer resolution and fulfillment.
Issues are unresolved.
Feelings are unexplored. Or, too painful to explore. Issues appear unsolvable. Thus, life experiences often fail to offer a sense of either resolution, completeness, or fulfillment. So a story that arranges its elements to offer experiences that are designed to be complete, resolved and fulfilling can take its audience above and beyond an ordinary state of thought and feeling, to a transcendent state.