the sentience and pain of the other, and the discipline of not looking away — against Gately's choice to abide in his…

echoes

Early text: [essay] (paraphrase; scan, not quotable) The essay's moral demand is attention: to insist on registering another creature's pain even when one's own pleasure depends on ignoring it. [Gourmet pp. 62–63]
IJ echo: The novel's counter-ethic of staying present to pain rather than fleeing it — Don Gately in the trauma ward, refusing narcotic relief and choosing to inhabit his own agony minute by minute (scene 175), the moral inverse of the addict's and the viewer's flight from discomfort. Where the Entertainment is the refusal-to-attend taken to death, Gately's abiding is the attention taken as far as a person can take it.
Weight: shared-preoccupation