abstract: This article examines how Jonathan Littell’s infamous novel The Kindly Ones draws upon the thought of Ernst Jünger in crafting its aesthetics of careful witnessing. Focusing in particular on Jünger’s book Radiations , which compiles his diaristic writing from World War II, I examine how Littell incorporates Jünger’s approach to narrating spectacles of killing into the construction of his novel’s narrator, the SS operative Maximilien Aue. Reading Jünger, I argue, allowed Littell to construct a narrator both complicit in the Nazi genocide, and yet capable of maintaining a critical distance from the death and pain around him.