Reading As a Moral Enterprise

Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy novel Warbreaker (2008) is a story about stories. A man has been raised from the dead—but he knows not why; perhaps there is no cosmic ‘why’ to be discovered. A sword has been given life in order to destroy evil: but what is evil? And how would a sword, even a sentient one, discern the merely unpleasant and unsavory from the bad or the corrupt? An emperor has lived his entire life in isolation: unseen, untouched, unheard. How could he learn to rule justly?