Toni Morrison’s sole short story, “Recitatif,” is, in her own words, “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” The challenge intended for the reader provides an opportunity to examine the moral self-reflective movement in sympathy, which is the main theme of the work as well as a drive for the reader’s engagement with the work. The argument of this paper starts from the view that morality is not reducible to rules of abstract universality or norms of prescriptive social value and that the subject inaugurates its reflexivity and ethical agency in the context of an enabling and limiting field of constraints in relation to a set of imposed norms and in relation to other subjects. Morality involves an acting subject, and the movement, act, or change takes place in self-reflection. As Adam Smith and Judith Butler argue, our self-reflection in ethical deliberation is facilitated in the interlocutory scene in which we are engaged in a dialogue with another whether internalized or existing. Morrison in this work shows that the desire or willingness to be engaged in a dialogue with another becomes the structural conditions for calling into question the truth of myself and my ability to tell the truth about myself and that such self-reflection is driven in the emotional closeness and mutual understanding between the two parties. While the two main characters build such a relationship, it also leads to their sympathy with a distant other. With its indeterminacy and ambiguity, Morrison also places this work in the social space or interlocutory situation created between her text and the reader. The feelings of sympathy that Morrison evokes in “Recitatif” serve as a call for moral self-reflection and inspire action not merely in matters of race. Sympathy, with its potential rooted in reciprocity and imagination, provides room for reflecting on and calling into question the truth of oneself, and the creative impulse in imagination activated in the communicative situation can propel a movement toward unknown others and indeterminate future.