Family Ethics In Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Novels

Cormac McCarthy(1933——)is a famous contemporary American novelist and playwright who has won the National Book Awards,the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,and The James Tait Black Memorial Prize.McCarthy’s novel creation is mainly divided into three stages: southern novels,western novels and post-apocalyptic novels.From 1965 to 1979,McCarthy wrote four southern novels against the background of the Appalachian Mountains,where he grew up.They are The Orchard Keeper(1965),Outer Dark(1968),Child of God(1973),and Suttree(1979).These four novels are also the starting point of McCarthy’s entire literary creation,and have an important influence on his novel creation in the middle and later stages.McCarthy’s early southern novels were influenced by the southern literary tradition,and at the same time reflected the criticism and subversion of the southern literary tradition of the United States.This article takes McCarthy’s four southern novels as the research object,from the perspective of family ethics,explores the disintegration of the family ethical structure in McCarthy’s southern novels from the perspective of parent-child relationship,sibling relationship,and marriage relationship between the sexes.The thesis starts from the parent-child relationship,and analyzes the absence of family ethics in McCarthy’s southern novels,to the contradictions and conflicts in ethical values and survival power between parents and children,and then to the complete rupture of the parent-child relationship.Secondly,starting from the relationship between siblings,it explores the impact of incest as a destructive force on the family structure and the chaos of ethical identity that leads to the estrangement and division between compatriots,and the failure of McCarthy’s attempt to reconstruct family ethics.Analyze the breakdown of marriage and family in McCarthy’s southern novels and the abnormally constructed marriage relationship between the sexes.Marriage is the basis for constructing a family.The failure of marriage leads to the collapse of the foundation of the family,which also means the complete collapse of the ethical structure of the family.Finally,he links McCarthy’s early southern novels with his mid-and late-stage novels,and explores the deepening of ethical concepts from family ethics to social ethics in McCarthy’s mid-and late-stage creations.Analyze McCarthy’s novels about the collapse of the current social ethical value system,and the inspiration and hope brought by the author’s reconstruction of the ethical structure in the ruins.