Moral Emotions and Narrative Multiperspectivity in Social Novels A Reading of Imre Kertész’s Detective Story

Abstract

This article explores the interplay between moral emotions and narrative structure in Imre Kertész’s Detective Story, focusing on how anger and compassion are evoked through its multilayered narrative perspective. Drawing on recent findings in moral psychology and cognitive literary theory, the study argues that social novels typically evoke emotional engagement—particularly moral emotions—to stimulate ethical reflection.

First, I will briefly summarize relevant psychological frameworks, including the dual-process theory of moral judgment and theories of moral emotions. Second, I will argue that anger and compassion are inevitably interconnected, based on the appraisal theory of anger. Third, I will apply these theoretical insights to literary reception, exploring which narrative structures elicit emotional responses such as anger, and how these responses are typically accompanied by compassion. My central example will be Imre Kertész’s Detective Story, a multilayered narrative. I contend that its three embedded narrative levels shape the emotional profile of the sociocritical narrative by reinforcing the first-order narrator’s explicit moral judgment through evooking anger and compassion in the reader.