ibing the atrocities obliquely, the impact on the reader is more painful than it would have been with a direct description. Now we understand the primary significance of the book's backwardness. The Holocaust was the ultimate repudiation and reversal of human morality. Its world of gas chambers and crematoriums was obscenely wrong, still inconceivable to most people even today. For the narrator, of course, it was the only world which made sense -- a happy world, dedicated to feeding the Jews, joining their families together, giving them property, rights, and even life. Only in a backwards world where taking is giving, and where destruction is creation can the holocaust make sense. Actually, he does offer one explanation as to why Tod/Odilo would consent to genocide when he writes: "I've come to the conclusion that Odilo, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers." By matching this statement up with his previous sayings about how "National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology" and how doctors are basically "biological soldiers", one gets the sense that Amis is trying to lift some of the blame off the individuals and putting more on the Nazi society whose health they have been dependent on. Now the puzzle of Tod's later life all fits together; even his assumed name acquires a new significance, as "Tod" is German for "death". "Tod Friendly" therefore represents the two phases of his life: the German years occupied with death, followed by the desperate friendliness he offered as atonement. As for "Verdorben", since its definitions in German include "corrupt" or "fallen", Amis's name for the doctor takes on a double meaning. In an inverted world, "Unverdorben" might be the word for corrupt. But the word can also mean the opposite -- innocent, unfallen, as if original sin could be undone (or it could even be a descripti...
