“Command Me, Confessor”: Violence, Power, and Ethics Within Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth Series

The late Terry Goodkind consistently claimed that his sprawling fantasy series The Sword of Truth was more than ‘mere’ fantasy, arguing that his work sought to explore fundamental philosophical questions about people. Taking this claim seriously, this chapter examines the political imaginary produced within Goodkind’s fiction as an expression of Randian objectivism. I argue that his fiction provides us with a conceptual space, an imaginary, wherein the internal contradictions of objectivism come clearly into focus and within which they can be further examined. I take his Confessors as my central example, arguing that the way these figures both represent and exercise ultimate political power reveals how Goodkind and objectivism understand the political. Through examining how Goodkind produces a world of absolute violence where power is impossible, I explore the ways that his fiction reveals objectivism’s contradictions, exploring how it fragments the social and political, and how it abolishes the ethical altogether.