A Study Of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs From The Perspective Of Narrative Ethics

Ian McEwan,as a master writer of contemporary English literature,his works has won him five times nominations of the Booker prize and won the prize in 1998 finally.“Black Dogs” is a novel with complicated ethical relationships,and also a postmodernism fiction with multiple narrative strategies.The reappearance of history is achieved through its unique narrative ethics by the author.The setting of this novel is mainly set after the World War II,when people and nations are suffering historical and social upheavals.In a deeper sense,it reflects the ethical relationships between nature and human beings,between human relations,and the survival ethic of spiritual salvation among people under historical turbulence.For contemporary British and American literature researchers,such a great writer is really a research object that we need to pay close attention to.In this thesis,Ian McEwan's novel Black Dogs is analyzed and studied through Narrative Ethics,which put forward by Adam Zachary Newton in Yeshiva University in 1995.Based on the criticism theory of narrative ethics by close reading,documentary research method and interdisciplinary research method,this thesis intends to explore narrative ethics through the analysis of narrative structure and narrative discourse.Through using narrative strategies(multi-points of view,nonlinear narrative time,and using of metaphors),narrative forms to interpret ethical thoughts from the perspective of the relationships between human beings,nature and society and to give a deeper understanding of such a special period ethical views employed by McEwan in this fiction.There are two parts to interpret this novel.For one thing,the third part of the thesis focuses on the interpretation of the ethics of narrative structure,and meanwhile it focuses on the ethical significance of the story structure in the novel.Through the interpretation of such themes,it can be drawn that different ethical relations intertwined with ethical environment to reflect the author's intentions on ethics of narrative structure.The author expresses the ethical concerns and ethical concepts by means of the heroine Jeremy's narration.For another,the fourth part of the thesis concentrates on elaborating the ethics of narrative discourse.This thesis attempts to explain the narrative strategies that lead to different ethical judgments,ethical changes and ethical connotations.In order to explore and solve the ethical dilemma in the process of narrating this novel,I'll try to use some narrative strategies,such as the conversion of multiple points of view,the nonlinear narrative time and the usage of metaphors to deal with.The expression of themes and the application of narrative strategies are not only an innovative and interdisciplinary study of literary works,but also fit the study essence of narrative ethics.This thesis is a tentative interpretation through using Narrative Ethics.The use of these narrative strategies is not only a means of defamiliarization and complication in the process of reading,but also of the author's ability to express his own ethical consciousness through narrative ethics.Thus,we can use these strategies as the starting point to explore the ethical situation in which the character met,to examine the moral judgments caused by the narrating of specific situations.At the same time,the readers can actively participate in the ethical judgments with the author and the discourse during their reading.