historical memory, and its lingering effects on all of us who are still trying to
come to terms with it.
Looking back on the whole narrative, we can see that Amis, inspired by
Lifton’s book on Nazi doctors, has found an effective way to confront the ethi-
cal and aesthetic challenges of representing the perpetrator. To be sure, his
approach is oblique—through Soul, not Odilo himself—and that approach
involves significant trade-offs. Amis’s rhetorical readers can bond with Soul
in a way that they could not with Odilo, but that very bonding reinforces a
certain distance from Odilo. That distance, in turn, heightens those readers’
negative ethical judgments of Odilo, but it also means that Amis will only par-
tially get inside the psychology of the perpetrator. Consequently, as I hope this
analysis has shown, Amis is able to use what may appear as a gimmick—the
backwards narration—as a key building block in what becomes for his rhetori-
cal readers a rich ethical and aesthetic experience, even as they remain aware
that this experience is ultimately just one partial glimpse into the complexity
of the perpetrators and the horror of the Holocaust itself.
134 • CHAPTER 6