This dissertation is a study of the contemporary novel and the “state of exception,” a notion from legal and political theory that refers to a situation or state in which the law has been suspended by a sovereign power in the name of a national emergency or a national security issue. The notion has been used increasingly after September 11 to refer to the ways in which the United States government has responded to this event: by extending surveillance mechanisms, suspending civil liberties, and so on. In the dissertation, I show how four novels that were published around 2001—Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001), Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2002), J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001)—use narrative strategies such as allegory, autobiography, focalization, and montage to intervene in the debates about the state of exception and the problematic aspects of sovereignty that they expose. Although each of the novels is highly critical of the sovereign power to decide on the state of exception, the novels do not reject sovereignty but instead explore how it can be practiced in other ways. Thus, the dissertation foregrounds the importance of literature for debates in which it has traditionally been eclipsed by political and theological discourse, and reveals literature's crucial role in shaping new ethical and political futures.