This essay offers a critical reading of Graham Swift’s Ever After which reveals the text to be engaged in a struggle to articulate a non-foundational, post-humanist ethics. Taking as its point of departure the novel’s intense preoccupation with the problematic of melancholia and mourning, it traces a movement from denial to acknowledgement of loss as a constitutive dimension of the human condition. It shows how the novel’s melancholic narrator-protagonist is forced to confront the impossibility of capturing “the real thing,” the self-completing object which, throughout his life, he has attempted to lay hold of through the redemptive ideologies of Literature, Romantic Love and History. Abandoning the principle of self-sameness for that of substitution, the narrator is seen tentatively to engage in a process of genuine mourning which may produce ethically desirable results: by the end of the novel, his sinister solipsistic fantasies appear to have given way to a readiness to enter into non-totalizing relations with other people.