A Study On The Narrative Ethics In Gish Jen's Typical American

As a member of Chinese American writers,Gish Jen is regarded as one of the “New Gang of Four”.Her magnum opus,Typical American,is widely praised by domestic and western academia.This novel is about three Chinese immigrants who lose their cultural identity while struggling for their American dream.Recently,some scholars have paid attention to the ethical values conveyed in Jen's novels,but few researchers have analyzed Typical American from the perspective of narrative ethics.Therefore,based on narrative ethics,the ethical values contained in Jen's Typical American will be reinterpreted in this thesis from the perspectives of story,discourse and reading.The first chapter of this thesis starts from the ethics on the story level of this novel.Through analyzing the ethical factors that cause the change of the ethnic identity of three protagonists Ralph,Helen and Theresa,this chapter intends to reveal the fact that the Confucian ethics held by Chinese immigrants are faced with great challenges from American ethics,resulting in various ethical dilemmas.The second chapter discusses from the discourse level how conflicting ethical relations are woven in the text to represent the ethical conflicts that ethnic others encounter in the process of cultural adaptation in American society,and further hints at Jen's questioning of the compromising cultural strategies of Chinese Americans.In light of James Phelan's “reader's participation” of rhetorical theory,Chapter Three focuses on the mimetic component and thematic component of the characters in the novel,with an aim to reveal the efforts of the novel in the exploration of a redefinition of the “typical American” as well as a reconstruction of multicultural ethics.By analyzing the narrative ethics on Typical American,this thesis points out the significance of Jen's redefinition of the “typical American” identity and reconstruction of multicultural ethics,and her justification for the Chinese immigrants who have long been “silenced” by the mainstream American society.The novel helps the readers to discover the hegemonic feature under the long-term influence of the American “melting pot” policy,and Jen's attempt to put forward the idea of harmoniously integrated multicultural ethics merits acknowledgement.