The collapse of Socratic metaphysics, of theology — the death of God, or the gods — and science's dismantling of the concept of the soul have deprived ethics of any claim to absolute truth.
The novel has replaced ethics with aesthetics as the principal justification for life and the source of transcendent meaning in the world. It returned meaning to life by positing, as an absolute value, the aesthetic value of each life in its unfolding. Our lives, according to the novel, are not meaningful to the extent that they are good or evil but because of their particularity (by which we mean freedom): however contingently, we live, desire, fail, triumph, survive, in our own little ways, in the broader chaos that followed from the death of God (a chaos, of course, that had always been there, but hidden from view by the gods we had made to disguise it).
By the gods' collapse we are returned to life: the novel has mapped our return and recorded our efforts to live alone, in the Real. Those efforts, to the extent that they are free, are beautiful: the novel presupposes that they are beautiful or it would not exist.
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