Narrative Ethics In Bellow’s Initiation Story Dangling Man

Dangling Man is the first novel written by American writer Saul Bellow in 1944.The diary-style novel depicts the living conditions of Jewish Americans during the Great Depression in the United States through the mouth of the protagonist Joseph,a Canadian young man waiting to join the Army in the United States during the Second World War.Due to his dual identity as an immigrant and a Jew,his army entry date has been postponed again and again.So he keeps a diary of his life and thoughts while waiting to join the army for more than four months.In his inner monologue,it can be seen that,at the beginning,he has been satisfied with his free life of staying at home to wait for the entry for army.Later,his multiple identities and various cultures are interwoven,combining to trouble him.The problems are mainly reflected in the contradictions between him and his wife,friends,relatives and neighbors.Although Joseph experiences a long journey of inner suffering,he realizes that freedom should be found among social relationships after a painful introspection.The title of the novel aptly illustrates the difficult situation of the protagonist Joseph in the absurd world,implying his identity crisis of modern people as “a dangling man”,but the ending of the novel is “eclectic”,tinged with optimism.At the same time,the whole process of Joseph’s growth and the narrative process of the novel are permeated with Bellow’s thought of narrative ethics.The word “narrative ethics” is first formally proposed by Adam Zachary Newton in Narrative Ethics(1997).Chinese and western theorists have their own unique insights about the theory.The west theorists mainly approach its form while Chinese theorists chiefly focuses on its content.Combining the two,the paper will analyze Dangling Man from the perspectives of “story ethics” and “narrating ethics”,based on Wu Maoguo’ s “ethics of story”and “ethics of narrating”,the former about content,the latter about form.The thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction,which consists of four parts: the introduction of Saul Bellow and his work Dangling Man,the literature review at home and abroad,the introduction of theory of narrative ethics,as well as the significance of the thesis and its structure.The second chapter is about the story ethics,namely,ethics revealed in what Dangling Man describes.It focuses on the content,and reflects on Bellow’s views on family and marriage,women,freedom,and war according to what Joseph records in his diary filled with his thoughts.From the four aspects,it analyzes Bellow’s views on important ethical subjects.The third chapter is about narrating ethics,that is,how Dangling Man is narrated,which is about the form.This chapter analyzes how the author guides readers to make ethical judgments through plot arrangement or narrative strategy,which is mainly divided into the following three aspects.The first is the diary-style narrative,including the first person internal perspective and the third person perspective.The second is about reliable narration and unreliable narration.Unreliable narrative talks mainly about bonding unreliable narration.The third is polyphonic narrative.Chapter four is an analysis of the writing characteristics of narrative ethics in Bellow’s novels.This chapter is actually an analysis of humanitarianism discussed in Bellow’s novels,including the humanistic treatment of the told and the humanistic choices of the telling.Chapter five is the conclusion.