While conversion into politics has been a standard way of rescuing ethics from antiquated humanistic moralizing for some time now, the recent "ethical turn" of the humanities reclaims ethics as itself open to radical reimagination. Proposes that this revision of ethics can provide a new understanding of postmodern American works which both sensitize their narrative procedures to ethical problems and present themselves as post-Holocaust texts. The emphasis is on the specifically postmodern dilemmas of ethicity and narrative (rather than Holocaust fiction as such), hence the choice of the four texts: "Maus" by Art Spiegelman, "How German Is It" by Walter Abish, "White Noise" by Don DeLillo, and "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. Identifies the theoretical framework as a specific strand in recent ethical thought: theories of obligation which are direct or oblique responses (by Derrida, Blanchot, Lyotard and de Certeau among others) to the influential and controversial oeuvre of Emmanuel Levinas. What links these divergent theories is that they pose the question of ethics as a question of the other, they have a troubled relation with speculative reason, and they put an enormous burden on the singularity of the ethical moment, a discontinuous and incalculable event.