Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Le Guin

These key texts foreground suffering children. Each founds its ethics in recoil from such horror but recycles it nonetheless, caught in ethical impossibility, repeating what it critiques. Poststructuralism stresses ethics as necessarily paradoxical, a response when there are no clear choices. Narrative provides a site for these insoluble dilemmas, encoding a voyeuristic ethics in excess of individual choices. Yet when narratives display children as the symbol of anguished lived contradictions, the rhetorical effects of this decision implicate those who take it. Ethics as theory provides a means to think through and in such inexplicable questions our readings uncover.