An Analysis Of The Human Stain From The Perspective Of Ethical Literary Criticism

Philip Roth(1933-)who has won the Pulitzer Prize for his American Pastoral in 1997 is regarded as one of the most famous and outstanding contemporary Jewish-American writers in the United States.As a controversial Jewish writer,Roth epitomizes the contradictions,conflicts and spiritual predicaments between Jewish communities and the American society and mainstream culture in his novels,of which the protagonists are mostly Jews or blacks with light skin color.The Human Satin,his twenty-fourth novel published in 2000,is no exception.This thesis,analyzing the ethical environment,ethical identity and ethical choices of three protagonists Coleman Silk,Faunia Farley and Delphine Roux,endeavors to uncover that The Human Stain is a masterpiece of ethical tragedy and the exposure of human nature which has been caused not only by social oppression and inequality and racial persecution and discrimination,but also by characters' internal confusions of their ethical identities compelled by existence pressure and the swelling of their free will.The protagonists' choices of free will stimulated during the dilemma of their ethical identity reconstruction lead them to the violation of ethical norms,moral principles and social conventions,ethical taboo and ethical order,eventually to their tragedies.Adopting ethical literary criticism,this thesis firstly probes into Coleman Silk's ethical tragedy.It explores the ethical environment,the ethical choices for his identity change and the ethical predicament after his identity concealment dominated by his free will.His death,brought by racial discrimination and social injustice but doomed,reflects Roth's ethical concern and moral care about racial discrimination and social inequality.Then,it analyzes Faunia Farley's confusion about both her family identity and social identity,which prompts her unique ethical choices for safety and primitive sexual pleasure via the self-denial of her identity.At last,this thesis further examines the failure of Delphine Roux's reconstruction of her feminine identity by exploring the collision between her ethical consciousness and traditional ethics and the conflicts between her and Coleman.It is implied that this novel has laid stress on human nature regarded from an ethical perspective and provided moral enlightenment for people in the process of pursuing freedom,equality,success and pleasure and reconstructing their ethical identities and meanwhile provided guidance for people to jointly fight against racial discrimination and social injustice in a real sense based on a new ethical relationship of the whole society.In The Human Stain,with the exquisite writing skills and keen insight to human society and human beings,Philip Roth profoundly depicts the characters' inner world and focuses on the various forms of human existence which are forged by the pursuits of a variety of desires,thus,this thesis,exploring the ethical nature of Philip Roth's The Human Stain and of human stain itself,expects that the interpretation from the perspective of ethical literary criticism can provide novel understanding and brand-new analysis of the pioneering writer Philip Roth and his novel for future studies.