Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim traces the struggle between Asa Leventhal and the antagonist, Kirby Allbee, over whether Leventhal is guilty of causing Allbee’s ruination and whether he should make reparations for his alleged victim. As previous criticism shows, responsibility has been a major topic in the discussion on the ethical implications of the novel. Instead of joining the debate over whether and how much Leventhal is responsible for Allbee’s destitution, this paper considers the protagonist’s transformation during the course of the story to be a process of relinquishing his obsession with responsibility and discovering the truly ethical response to others. I argue that Leventhal, through a series of involuntary visions, discovers the truly ethical response to others lies in testimony rather than the application of law and norms. Drawing on the parallels between the ethical situations in Bellow’s novel and in the Auschwitz concentration camp, as discussed by Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz, this paper employs Agamben’s ethics of testimony, his concept of shame as the structure of human subjectivity, and his differentiation between law and ethics to analyze the change in Leventhal’s attitude toward Allbee and his own brother. The introductory section discusses Agamben’s ideas of bare life and biopolitics, which are essential to an understanding of his ethics of testimony. The first section deals with Leventhal’s confusion of law and ethics; the second part details Leventhal’s experience of the Agambenian ethical subject of testimony; the third section analyzes how Leventhal abandons juridico-normative thinking after experiencing shame. The paper concludes with the meaning of the title of The Victim and the wider applicability of Agamben’s ethics of testimony.