An Ecological Narratological Interpretation Of Ian McEwan’s Solar

Ian Russell McEwan, an English contemporary writer, is one of the mostinfluential writers in British literature since1970s, who is the Man Booker Prizewinner and the hopeful for Somerset Maugham Award, Whitman Prize. The commontheme of McEwan’s works is to probe the relationship between human beings,especially in exploring the sexual behavior between male and female. He is skilled indepicting human nature with concise and exquisite words. In recent years, McEwan’sview has spread to broader level, which exerts McEwan’s fierce politicalconsciousness and ecological thought. Solar, Ian McEwan’s eleventh novel publishedin March,2010, is a novel concerning about climate change and ecotype energy whichhas raised extensive attention and good reputation among critics and readers. In May,2010, Solar was awarded the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for its humor.Writing in humorous and ironic style, McEwan exposes the serious theme——thenegative effect of human nature in the relationship between human and nature, andhuman beings’ distorted ecological view.This paper tries out applying narratology to analyze Solar, in order to exposeMichael Beard, the anti-hero’s weakness of human nature with narratologicalsequence, to analyze the irreconcilable contradiction between human nature andnature with commentary, and then to convey author’s ecologism thought. This paperhas five parts including introduction, main body and conclusion.First of all, the background information about the author and his work, theliterature review, the significance of the study, the structure and methodologies of thethesis have been introduced in the Introduction.The second chapter concentrates on analyzing the action sequence of theprotagonist, Michael Beard with Todorov’s narratological sequences, discussing theunbalanced and rigidified narratological sequences from Beard’s physical condition,marriage and love, career. From it, we get that an anti-hero is unable to burden theecological responsibility.The third chapter analyzes the bout between human nature and nature throughthe intervention of the narrator, or called Commentary. In a novel, the narrator usuallyintrudes into the novel to interpret, judge or generalize the discourse and the story. As well, this chapter will introduce Chatman’s Commentary theory, and then will analyzethis novel from commentary on the discourse and commentary on the story ofinterpretation, to draw a conclusion that the bout between human nature and nature isthe root to cause ecological crisis. Therefore, the bout between human nature andecology is the real problem that we should solve first, and then we can save thenature.The forth chapter will turn to analyze the author’s ecological view thathumanism needs turn to ecologism. After analyzing the voice of nature and that of themen who dominate the program of saving the earth, we get that under the drive ofhumanism, that with the idea of instrumental rationality, human beings can’t protectthe environment and save the earth from peril.Finally, the conclusion has been drawn that what Ian McEwan wants to conveyto the readers through this novel is that on the way to save the nature, we should saveour human nature first.This paper applies narrative techniques to analyze Solar which reveals theprofound meaning of this novel. This research will be available to the furthersupplement of anybody new enter.