Reading Ha Jin’s Waiting From An Ethical Literary Criticism Perspective

As the representative writer of American overseas Chinese literature, Ha Jin continuously gained a lot of American literature prizes. In his representative work Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of a dedicated army doctor who was torn by his love for two women:one belongs to the New China during the time of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the Old China with ancient traditional ideas pervading. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless university of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, he vividly reveals the complexities and subtleties of a world awash with ethical problems. Among the uncountable turns that have been identified in recent years’literary theories, the ethical turn is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and important. This phenomenon itself is worthy of thinking about.Thus this research project aims at studying Waiting, one of Ha Jin’s most acclaimed works, from the perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism. According to Professor Nie Zhenzhao, the basic function of literature is not aesthetic but teachings. In the vast landscape of problems and questions connected to ethics presented in the novel, this paper will focus on three problems specifically, that is, marriage ethics, parent-child ethics and sexual ethics. By doing so, the thesis is divided mainly into five parts.The first chapter begins with a brief introduction to the author Ha Jin and his works and the exiting researches on Waiting, aiming to provide an ontological landscape of the fiction in general and a new literary critical approach, namely, the Ethical Literary Criticism, employed to interpret this text. The subsequent three chapters focus on the three problems respectively. Chapter Two situates the marriage ethics by analyzing both ethics of the husband represented by Lin Kong and ethics of the wife, represented by Shuyu and Manna. Chapter Three addresses the parent-child ethics not only from the perspective of the parents but also that of the children. And the forth chapter focuses on the sexual ethics and particularly on the sexual repression and sexual violence.Through a detailed examination of the text, this thesis argues and demonstrates from different perspectives the point that the characters’suffering from not only social oppression but also self-depression, which reflects the suffering of numerous people at that time, is mainly due to the incompatibility between the traditional ethics and the changing social reality.