Atrocity doesn't just come out of evil, Endo was saying, it emerges from self-interest, timidity, apathy and the desire for status.
Endo's lens on the story is not the easiest one, ethically speaking; he doesn't dwell on the suffering of the victim. Instead, he chooses to explore a more unsettling element: the humanity of the perpetrators.
Here on my screen was the distillation of a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.
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