A Study Of Animal Ethics In Coetzee's Novels

The history of human-animal companionship is as long as the history of human civilization,and the moral consideration of human-animal relations has been around for a long time.However,it was not until the second half of the 20 th century that animal ethics became a hot topic in society,and then a kind of theory and discipline.Nobel prize winner J.M.Coetzee's personal stance on animal issues has intrigued the academia in studying animal ethics in his fiction.Disgrace and The Lives of Animals discuss animal ethics through two pratagonists who have complex humanistic morals and beliefs on animals,while Dusklands does so through a villain named Jacobus Coetzee who's cruel to animals.In fact,all his novels deal with animal issues to some extent,and the animal images can be categorized into symbolic animals and real animals.As symbols of dehumanized /zoomorphized humans,symbolic animals show how human language and culture exploits animal images.Through the depiction of real animals,Coetzee presents a society in which animals are abject.And then we see the double violence inflicted on animals.Coetzee never gives a one-size-fits-all moral judgment in his works,instead,he touches upon thought-provoking ethical issues.The legitimacy of animal euthanasia,animal slaughter and hunting presented in the above three novels are all controversial ethical issues in real life.The three protagonists hold different ethical views on these issues: David Lurie gradually develops care ethics through his relationship with real animals;Elizabeth Costello challenges the authority of reason in Western tradition and emphasizes sympathethic imagination and virtue ethics,while Jacobus Coetzee,because of killing animals indiscriminately,is a character completely devoid of animal ethics.The protagonists' opinions on animal ethics reflect Coetzee's own.Coetzee's ethical choice of vegetarianism,his praise of emotion-centered ethics,and his thoughts on the status of animals can all be found in Lurie or Costello.After discussing Coetzee's novels and his own animal ethical viewpoint,this paper attempts to show Coetzee's belief and strategy in awakening people's animal ethical consciousness by the art of fiction.