Identity Confusion And Ethical Choices

Edward Albee is one of the most important American playwrights in20th century. He was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Drama three times and made tremendous contributions to both drama creation and theatre direction. Not only is he a serious dramatist who created dozens of innovative, experimental and original works, but also a first-rate stage director and university professor. Albee drew much on his personal experience, and almost all of protagonists assemble his families and friends. Albee’s works are projected with following salient features:Firstly, his works directly point to reality; secondly, his works have the typical feature of "minimalism":short in length, simple in plot, and few in characters; t; thirdly, all his works are written in the colloquial language, full of irony and mockery. The whole dissertation falls into four sections.Part one is the introduction, which contains an introduction to Albee’s life and works, the current status of Albee studies, research methodology of this dissertation. The times when Albee began to create drama was a special stage for American society which was undergoing transition:American tradition culture, the main content is Puritan culture, was suffering unprecedented challenge. As a result, Albee tried to respond to the transitional American society by creating drama. He depicts the real society with rationality loss, morality deteriorated, and ethics absent in a pessimistic, hopeless perceptive, with Ironic of American pastoral and aborted moral fable to portray the pictures of real America. This thesis tried to explain Albee’s dramas in the method of Ethical Literary Criticism, and the primary attention is focused on human’s identity problems, such as identity curiosity, identity loss, identity arrogation and so on. And further study will be made to explore many core ethical issues caused by identity problems such as moral imbalance, rationality loss and order breakdown. In Albee’s dramas, moral and ethical problems are merged into character’s complicated relations:man and man, man and animal, man and society, in order to show Albee’s ethical considerations about family, nature and society.From charter2to4, this thesis will explain Albee’s ethical thoughts from three dimensions:Firstly, Albee’s dramas incarnate such a kind of ethical thoughts that is the imbalance of moral value leads to moral crisis, and then causes ethical crimes in the real society. In this thesis, Everything in the Garden and The Man Who Had Three Arms were selected to analyze the moral awareness behind Albee’s writing. With the endless expansion of lust, the protagonists in Everything in the Garden lost their rationality gradually and committed ethical crime under the governance of animal factor. Thus the "fun morality" representing irrational will defeat the "goodness morality" representing rational will. Albee seeks to pursuit and yearning for kindness and beauty by describing these characters’moral value and the clash of good and evil in his works. The Man Who Had Three Arms aims to tell us that when humans’ mentality of seeking novelty works, they may take someone who had malformation as the influence and remarkable outcome of the times and lost their foundational moral as humans during the process. The imbalance of moral evolution symbolizes that our time’s "malformation". The Man Who Had Three Arms reflect the reality when this kind of evolution twists and moral constraint losses its power, which aims to appeal for people not to give up pursuing moral ideal and model spirit.Secondly, the ethical thoughts in Albee’s dramas are embodied in his concern about family problems:the genetic connection was fractured universally which leads to all kind of family contradictions in modern society. This thesis will take The American Dream and A Delicate Balance as examples to illustrate Albee’s focus on family ethic. The American Dream is mainly developed around a "loveless marriage" and characters’emotional desolation. Because of the characters in the drama killed their son and tyrannized their mother, these behaviors violate the already formed ethical taboo, for which it caused the ethical crisis. By revealing the fracture of the genetic connection, this drama manifests author’s yearning and protection for traditional family ethical order. While in A Delicate Balance, Albee seeks to display a normal family’s daily life with "small wars" but "large anxieties" comprehensively. He also discussed the ethical dilemma and emotional entanglement behind family contradictions, which can be references for the mediation and balance of intergenerational relations.Thirdly, the ethical thoughts of Albee’s dramas also cut a concern to humans-animal relations: the ethical relations between humans and animal could be break down if their identities arrogated. As the result, ethical disorder occurs. This thesis chooses The Zoo Story and The Goat, or who is Sylvia? to introduce that Albee appeal to build up rational ethical relation between humans and animals by his writing. The failure of "dog-human communication" means the humans communication can be only realized by interest’s exchanges and the unreliability of such communication. While "The stool disturbance" tell us interpersonal relations are just like the zoo as a metaphor:humans are segregated by setting "the spiritual fence", and if we want to break down the fence we may pay the price of our life. On the other hand, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is a fable about "human-beast relations". The radical reason for the Martins’ family contradictions and emotional entanglement lies in Martin’s arrogation of ethical identity which caused ethical disorder. In the end, Martin’s wife killed the goat on the stage, which enlightened us deeply:the disordered relations between humans and animals will not only bring agony to humans, but also cause cruel massacre to animals.Finally, on the basis of the summary of moral purport and ethical concern reflected in Albee’s dramas, we need to make a summary about expressive methods and Narrative skills he uses to create these dramas. The deep meaning of Albee’s writing is unpacked through analyzing closely characters’ identity transformation and identity crisis. Accordingly, an analysis of ethical identity is drives our understanding of character’s moral dilemma. The characters’ rational awareness is sometimes so feeble that they are easily controlled and governed by irrational will, which may cause immoral misconducts and even ethical crime. Albee told the story in the mode of external focalization, and these stories tend to develop in accordance with daily life, mask characters, and metaphorical language. He even tried to project the characters’ inner conflicts between goodness and ethical choices by inner focalization. Additionally, all Albee’s works described the preposterous and contradictive family life by what we call "unnatural narrative" and "unreliable narration", so as to discuss ethical relations about family, marriage, intimacy and love; then to reveal such ethical issues as the incest, promiscuity, faith, betray, murder, torture, isolation, dread, agony, self-accusation, suicide, self-mutilation, evasion, loss, indulgence, restraint, deformation dissimilation and so on. Thus it can display characters’ ethical awareness and ethical pursuit, which could highlight Albee’s moral purport and ethical concern.