| The novel Treasure Island contains three dimensional relations which are “the sea”,“theship” and “the crew” and it is deemed that each dimension is an ethical situation. The individual ineach ethical context has his or her own ethical identity. The whole story is developed around thisthree-dimensional relation. And “the sea” represents the relation of human and society;“the ship”represents the relation of human and others, and “the crews” is the representative of human and self.Therefore, to understand and analyze this three-dimensional relation is the key point of graspingthe whole story. In the three-dimensional relation, each person has his own ethical choices. So inthis thesis, the author will adopt ethical literary criticism to analyze this three-dimensional relation.The fundamental function of ethical literary criticism is to understand and explain literary works, toanalyze the phenomena in literary works, as well as to discuss the relations among writers, literaryworks, and readers. Therefore, analyzing the ethical phenomena represented in literature seems tobe a necessary job for scholars both at home and abroad. The author will begin from the three-dimensional relation and analyze human values reflected in it. The ethical misplacement of humanvalues is the root cause of people’s different values and ethical choices. In other words, the actors’ethical misplacement of values is the subjective cognitive reason of the evil, for evil is the productof people’s free will and it has close relation to the perceived values. So if there is themisplacement in one’s ethical values, one will probably turn into evil. In the three-dimensionalrelation, different ethical choices have distinguished evil from good. And it is the ethicalmisplacement of human values in each ethical situation that determines the different ethical choices.Of course, the human values reflected in the novel are not isolated or imaginary. It has closerelation with the ideology of British Empire in the19thcentury. |
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