But how is the rigidity, the inevitability, of tragedy to be resisted? William T.

Vollmann's best answer is the form he has used to describe the tragedy, the way the full complexity of the countess and the clay-eater's positions are rendered by his portraiture and responsible imagining of their historical determinations and ethical stances. Uneasy with class or creed, he instead venerates empathy:

The Empath's Golden Rule: Do unto others, not only as you would be done by, but also as they would be done by. In the case of any variance, do the most generous thing.

Exemplified by the richly extended sympathy of this teeming narrative, this seems admirable; boiled down into the Moral Calculus, it seems a fragile thing to set against the violence he has catalogued so powerfully.