ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses E. L. Doctorow’s ethical commitment and places it within the context of the more general turn to ethics in philosophy and criticism. It addresses contemporary debates regarding narrative empathy and reader response. By withdrawing excessive ethical guidance, Doctorow’s novels encourage critical awareness and intellectual distance while also inspiring powerful emotional responses to the suffering of the other, compelling readers to experience outrage in the face of injustice and, hopefully, helping them internalize their ethical response. Such an analysis of the ethical and political agenda of Doctorow’s literary project contests the dark destiny for novels predicted by John Barth, who in his essay “The Novel in the Next Century” foresaw that reading fiction would become a highly specialized and anachronistic activity, a “more or less elite taste, akin to chess or equestrian dressage”.
