Zombie Ethics: Narratives of Liberation and Entrapment in Tibetan Zombie Tales and George Saunders' "Liberation Day"

This paper examines narrative control and agency through a comparative analysis of the Tibetan collection of "Zombie Tales" (ro sgrung) and George Saunders' 2022 dystopian short story "Liberation Day." Both works employ speculative fiction to present protagonists who become so engrossed in narratives that they forget themselves and fail to achieve their goals. In the Zombie Tales, a prince repeatedly responds to a captive zombie's stories about karma, compromising his mission. In Saunders' dystopia, a memory-wiped "Speaker" named Jeremy kills his would-be liberators while absorbed in narrating a historical battle. Both works thus explore a central tension: narratives can be vehicles of both control and liberation. This comparative reading highlights a salient feature of Buddhist ethics–though they espouse general moral virtues, they also insist on the irreducibly particularist nature of ethical action.