The Moral Transgressors’ Repentance An Analysis Of The Reader From Ethical Literary Criticism

As a writer, Bernhard Schlink has made considerable achievements in mystery novels. In1989his works Cut the Gordian Knot won the German reasoning novel award "Grouse Award". And the novel The Reader is undoubtedly his most sensational work. The Reader gained several literary awards, and has been translated into35languages. It is the first German book which sets foot on the New York Times bestsellers list. The movie, adapted from the novel, won the2009movie Golden Globe Award, and the Academy Awards. Although many scholars research into this novel from different perspectives. This thesis attempts to make an effort to study this novel from the perspective of ethical literary criticism.Ethical literary criticism is a new and positive exploration made by Professor Nie Zhenzhao on the basis of traditional ethical criticism. It’s a criticism with interdisciplinary nature,which tries to combine the ethical study with textual analysis of literary works. Literature has an indispensable relationship with ethics. Ethics is the study of moral phenomena and moral activities, as the relationship between people in society. Literary work turn the real world into the artificial world with the help of combing the fake plot and discription of art. So there will be new fields to explore by using the broad literary theories which also combines with ethical methodology. There are four steps to make the ethical literary criticism into the practice. The first step is finding out the ethical phenomenon exists in the specific world, the last step is to analyze the ethical phenomenon of the text reasonably.This thesis includes five parts. The opening of the text introduces background knowledge of the research. It also summarizes the purpose of this study and the importance. In the theoretical part, it elaborates the significance, theoretical framework and methodology of ethical literary criticism. The second part of the thesis analyzes Hanna and Michael, the two moral transgressors and the reason why they overstep the moral limitations. The third part of thesis focuses on the trails and punishments to Hanna and Michael. The judge for Hanna happens in the real court, but that one for Michael is in his spiritual world. The fourth part of the thesis describes the confession of Hanna and Michael. The conclusion part points out the purpose of the description of immoral relationship, is to reveal the crimes of German Nazi.