The City Image In The Comfort Of Strangers

Ian Russell McEwan’s remarkable novel The Comfort of Strangers,which was published in1981and adapted into a film in the1997, isconsidered to be one of his significant works produced during the “IanMacabre” period. McEwan is keen on some absorbing subjects and marginaltopics, such as violence, death, sex and ethic. By his excellent style of writing,he hammers at showing the good and evil sides of human nature, dealing withpeople’s loss and anxiety, dread and fear, despair and hope from differentangles. Ever since The Comfort of Strangers was published, many domesticand overseas scholars and commentators have done some research on it,showing much interest in the themes of abnormal sexuality and human nature.This thesis attempts to analyze this novel from the perspective of urbanstudies.There is no doubt that literature is concerned with human life and theworld. The city is a place where human life is fully displayed. Yet, the city isthe output of human thoughts and activities, which are characterized by thechanges of times. So, writers convey their understandings of the city throughtheir own ways of representation. In The Comfort of Strangers, both ofconcrete and abstract city images comprise the unnamed city. Ian McEwangives much description of the city where the story is set. Actually, thedescription of the city serves as the representation of human experiences frombeginning to end.The author of this thesis holds that The Comfort of Strangers should notonly be interpreted in terms of social ethics, and that the themes of love and lust, virtues and vices should not be just discussed with the conflicts of thecharacters and the dramatic development of the story. The reason is thathuman experiences imply the conflicts between the traditional and the moderncultures during the progress of urbanization. In The Comfort of Strangers, IanMcEwan not only narrates human experiences in the unnamed city, but he alsoconveys his deep concern for human life and urban civilization. The variouscity images are actually the narration of human beings’ experiences in theirpursuit of universal values. Considering McEwan’s thoughts on literary ideasand his unique narrating patterns of this novel, the author of this thesis alsoprobes into the complicated relationship between the city and a literary textand points out that what distinguishes this novel from some traditional literarytexts is its typical narration of different images of the city, concrete orabstract. It is also pointed out that, the importance of the literary textuality ofliterary works should be paid equal attention to. A literary text not onlyprovides a simple reproduction of the city but it also offers a new way ofreconstructing the whole story and the city.