Emotion, Cognition, Morality--a Study Of Love In Ian Mcewan’s Enduring Love

As a contemporary writer, Ian McEwan occupies a significant position in English Literature. Although his early works are controversial, full of astonishing incest, death and so on, since the1990s, especially in the new century, McEwan has broken through his early writing style, and his later works have been accepted by critics, reviewers and general readers. He has also become an innegligible tide in the river of English contemporary literature.Enduring Love is the sixth novel of McEwan, which, on publication, is well received by critics and readers. Centering on the subject of "love", the novel is mainly about a ballooning accident and the aftermath following it. Several strangers come to save the boy trapped in the hot-air balloon, but one of them lets go of the rope first, which leads to a tragedy that Logan falls from a height of more than three hundred feet on the ground and loses his life. The tragic event changes Joe’s life. It not only buries Joe in the sea of guilt, but also triggers Parry’s abnormal love to him, which puts the harmonious love relationship between Clarissa and Joe into a dilemma.The thesis first gives a detailed description of the three protagonists’different attitudes toward love, and then makes a comparison between their different behavior before and after the accident. It also analyzes the psychological and cognitive influence on their behavior from the perspective of psychology and cognition. In this thesis, I employ Jung’s "Persona" theory as well as attribution theory, which help analyze the protagonists’psychological development as well as Parry’s morbid love. In the end, it probes into the complicated and delicate relationships between love and morality, which are main concerns underlying the story.