The Wasted Vigil figures ethical encounter as reading others’ stories carefully

Evidence

I would argue that this active idea of defamiliarization can profitably be brought to bear on Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil, which in its own right encourages a sense of overlapping histories and textualities. The novel is in essence concerned with “How stories travel—what mouths and minds they end up in” (25, emphasis in original). The house of the English Muslim convert Marcus Caldwell to which each of the main characters comes, is a “house of readers”: confronting all with the need to read each other’s experiences while also reading the tangled histories that have brought them there with all the attention and care they would lavish on one of the books suspended from the ceiling. Marcus observes, “Through stories we judge our actions before committing them” (87). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 397

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ethics begins with stories, not dictates, and demands patient listening to others — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 127