Abstract

The essay discusses and analyzes the interweaving and exchanges between moral responsibility and aesthetic irresponsibility in literary forms. In the first part, the Freudian tools derived from Giacomo Debenedetti and Francesco Orlando are illustrated and a hypothetical model of «compromise formation» is developed as a key to interpreting the conflict between ethics and desire in every literary text. Finally, novels of the Israeli writer Abram Yehoshua are offered as a case study, and in particular «The Human Resources Supervisor’s Mission» (2004), considered as a real ideal sample for this investigation