Transitivity Analysis Of Ethical Flaws In Ian McEwan's Solar

Ian McEwan is one of the most renewable novelists in the word. He amplifies humanity in his work which attracts readers and critics all over the world. His eleventh novel Solar has gained widely attention since the publication. Although comprehensive studies have been made on McEwan in academic circle, systemic investigations still need to be further gone into. Solar is filled with the protagonist Beard's escape from marital responsibility which completely exposes his opposing judgment of ethics. Though he seems to take the initiative in marriage, as a matter of fact, he is just an evader of life.This thesis aims to analyze the protagonist Beard's ethical flaws from the perspective of transitivity in systemic-functional linguistics. It puts forward my new ideas on expounding ethical issues by means of transitivity system which on one hand presents further understanding on McEwan's Solar while on the other hand provides a new approach to literary appraisals. With the help of UAM Corpus Tool, this thesis excerpts distinctive transitivity process of Beard from Solar and works out the statistical distribution of different type of processes. Typically, when he arranges the scene of death to frame Tarpin, the decreasing number of mental and verbal processes indicates Beard's loss of mind while the monotonous material processes reflect Beard's dominance of criminality. The shift of transitivity processes that comes along with Beard's decreasing thoughts and mechanizing action foreshadows his losing of humanity. Meanwhile, Beard's mental processes serve as his tools for beautifying himself and expose his resistance towards his ethical responsibilities of marriage. As a father, it exposes Beard's unwillingness with insufficient self-recognition from his mental processes which leads to his incompetence in nursing his daughter.Based on the statistics, this paper studies the selection of linguistic forms and puts forward new ideas on unfolding ethical phenomena and interpreting ethical judgments which further proves the feasibility and practicality of systemic-functional grammar in literary stylistic analysis.