ABSTRACT
The term narrative ethics is variously understood. It may refer to Aesopian I stories that end with a take-home moral or to the vicarious experience provided by reading, especially novel-reading, that educates and exercises moral perception. The tradition stretches from Horace,1 who early in the first millennium wrote that literature should at once teach and delight, to Wayne Booth2 and Martha Nussbaum,3 contemporary scholars who have restored the consideration of literature’s moral force to critical and theoretical respectability. Adam Zachary Newton has argued that narrative is ethics,4 and an understanding of plot supports him.
