The Spiritual Journey Of Zuckerman—An Ethical Literary Analysis Of Exit Ghost

Philip Roth(1933-) is a famous Jewish American writer. Exit Ghost is the last novel of Zuckerman books, which is his most famous masterpiece. The novel is developed in the sequence of Zuckerman’s withdrawing from society and living in solitude, going back to the city and finally returning to the nature, mainly depicting various ethical events and his psychological activities in this process. Although its plot is not complicated, the novel still has deep ethical connotation. This paper has deeply and thoroughly researched the ethical connotation of this novel with the method of close reading and in the theory of ethical literary criticism. First, the paper has analyzed the reasons why Zukerman has determined to go back to the city. Zuckerman, who has the Sphinx factor, is driven by natural will and free will, and his body desire has been aroused by them. At the same time, his spirit has also revived slowly by Jewish redemption thoughts of his friend, Larry. So Zuckerman has decided to leave from the mountain and go back to the city without hesitation and restore his ethical identity. Then, he encounters the various confused ethical environments, including the confusions of life caused by the lost of family ethics, the horrible society caused by lack of political ethics, and the spiritual crisis caused by moral degeneration. The various ethical environments have made Zukerman caught in predicaments in every kind of relationships including man and ego, man and others, man and society. Finally, the paper has used ecological ethics to analyze the reasons why Zukerman determined to exit from the city and return to the nature. In the city, Zuckerman has suffered from the irreversible conflicts between his identity and the ethical environments, and his soul has also lost its tranquility of the past. Zukerman, coming to his senses, has increasingly and clearly realized that only the life close to the nature can provide him with the soul habitat. So, Zuckerman, in the spiritual enlightenment, has decided to exit from the noisy and ostentatious city and return to the nature deliberately and completely, and after that he has achieved the maturity and sublimation of human nature.From the analysis of Zuckerman’s spiritual journey, the paper has concluded the ethical connotation of the novel: the predicament of Sphinx under sexual ethics, the ethical predicament caused by the ethical environment and the life reflection under the ethical predicament. Meanwhile, the research above can provide modern people who are in spiritual predicaments with a good method to establish the harmonious relations hips between man and ego, ma n and others, ma n and society, as well as man and nature.