This
article discusses the ethical potential
of fiction as an artistic storytelling practice that facilitates
the exchange of experiences by constructing a shared terrain of understanding
between author and reader. Buchenwald
survivor Jorge Semprun’s fiction is ethically
valuable because it both facilitates the exchange of experiences and
disrupts the communication of experience
that lies beyond imagination. In La Montagne blanche (1986), narrative doubles defer the arrival of the experience of death so that what is exchanged is the experience as unexperienced, and the storytelling
exchange itself becomes an art of survival after the Holocaust.