The "ethical turn" in literary criticism that has increased since the 1990s is highly relevant to readings of Ian McEwan`s recent novels. Besides the author`s own emphasis on morality and the ethics of the novel on various occasions, many critics, particularly those who address McEwan`s oeuvre in relation to the tradition of English realism, directly or indirectly focus on the narrative ethics and/or morality of McEwan`s fictions. The debate over the moral implication of Saturday is extremely polarized. While some critics have praised it for realistically capturing the feel of post-September 11 life or for the protagonist Henry Perowne`s moral victory, others have faulted it for replicating what Paul Gilroy termed "postcolonial melancholia," a psychological condition prevalent in the First World, especially in the UK and the US, revealed in increasing anxiety about personal safety in the face of the threatening social, racial, cultural, and/or postcolonial Other. Despite the differences, many criticisms about Saturday share several assumptions. The first is the assumption that realism is morally superior to modernism. The second is that the author is basically sympathetic rather than critical toward his protagonist. And finally, by reading Saturday as a story about an ordinary family that survives the attempted murder and rape by a pathological home intruder, Baxter, and especially by regarding Baxter as an allegory of the vengeful Other-the lower-class, the Saddam Hussein, or the Third World-they reveal prejudice and hostility toward the socio-cultural or racial Other, a tendency that provokes an urgent need to examine carefully the ethics of the criticism that stresses the ethics of the novel in the post-colonial, multicultural era. Borrowing Frank Kermode`s notions of the "secrets" that disturb and contradict "narrative sequences," this paper argues first, that far from simply normalizing or endorsing Henry`s perspectives and attitudes toward Baxter, Saturday creates critical distances within the text by pointing to Henry`s shallow moral consciousness, hypocrisy, and his self-serving blindness to the agony of the Other. Second, this paper demonstrates that the limits and the achievements of Saturday in its dramatization of the confrontation of the privileged with the less privileged can be better understood by looking at the ways in which Mrs. Dalloway-one of the texts that Saturday most explicitly echoes-gives a voice to the social Other and creates a space for the mutual understanding and genuine sympathy between human beings. In sum, this paper, by reading Saturday not simply as a story about a family that survives unexpected terrorism, but as a story about a man who wishes to survive in a world that constantly marginalizes, obliterates, and/or criminalizes him, proposes that McEwan`s novel urges us to move beyond the postcolonial melancholia.