The Ethical Wasteland In The Cement Times

Ian McEwan is generally acknowledged as a unique and distinctive figure in the history of twentieth-century English Literature. The Cement Garden, his first novel is not only shocking for its authentic description of Oedipus Complex and incestuous love, but is concerned with the survival problems of the contemporary human beings, such as the unbalanced ecological environment, destructed environment, spiritual emptiness, degeneration of family ethics and psychological insanity. The modern world, symbolized by skyscrapers built by steel and cement can be reasonably called the cement times. The Cement Garden reveals many kinds of ethical problems through the description of the daily life of a family, which are the focus of this thesis set from the ethical perspectives.The introductory section includes a brief introduction to Ian McEwan and his main literary achievements. It also provides a summary and literature review of The Cement Garden and the theme and significance of this research. Ian McEwan is one of the most celebrated writers in 20th-century Britain. This thesis explores the ethical problems existing in the modern England through a detailed analysis of his first novel The Cement Garden so as to arouse people's attention to the building of sound ethics.The second chapter is concerned with the ecoethical problems existing in The Cement Garden. The issue of ecosystem is becoming one of the world's most emergent problems. The analysis of the waste land, the closed space and boundaries such as the isolated house they live in, the cement garden and the trunk the children bury their mother in, both demonstrates and proves that modern people break the traditional ecoethics to seclude themselves from nature by using cement, steel and concrete. The death of the parents in this novel symbolizes the loss of ethic and nature respectively. The nature dies if the ethics diminishes.The third part focuses on ethical problems concerning the abnormal relationships in the family and the four orphans'psychological problems generated by lacking of family ethics. There is no intimate relationship between parents and children. The relationships between sisters and brothers are also beyond the normal family ethics. The phenomena of the boys'Oedipus Complex, Jack's Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Tom's gender identity disorder, the incestuous love between Jack and Julie show that these children degenerate into barbarism when they become orphans without any concepts of family ethics.The fourth part focuses on the alienated relationships between the family and the other people to show that people in the modern world are egocentric and indifferent to others. This family is seclude from outside and has few connection with others. The government and other people also show neglect to these four orphans also show modern people's indifference.This paper concludes with a discussion about the severe results caused by the diminishing ethics through the analysis of The Cement Garden. People in the cement times should build healthy ethics so as to restrain this world from degeneration.