The Extremities of Empathy

Abstract While trauma victims may be recognized immediately as people murdered, raped, and tortured, victims of trauma may include another startling group of people: the perpetrators of the trauma, who may suffer as victims of trauma – from the very trauma they inflict upon other people. In Chang-rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life , the perpetrator suffers from the violent acts he commits. Even as Lee portrays this autodiegetic narrator’s mindset, readers avoid complicity as they encounter aestheticized representations of violence and control. Lee employs the border-crossing empathy that confronts the dilemmas of representing suffering and atrocities head-on through implementing deliberate narrative strategies designed to evoke what Black calls “productive ethics” in readers. This implementation of empathy allows for the necessary revelations about the perpetrators of atrocities to be heard and learned from, rather than ignored.