Related to the previous post...

'The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscience, that he is and has been perhaps for a long time engaged with these questions. And this is why the main scenes of horror are never directly addressed. I think it is sufficient to remind people, because we've all seen images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things. And also paralyze, as it were, our moral capacity. So the only way in which one can approach these things, in my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.'

- W. G. Sebald

From, The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, (Seven Stories Press, 2010, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz), p.80.