Ian Mcewan’s Fictions In The Crises Past And Contemporary

As a winner of almost all major English fiction awards, Ian McEwanhas established himself over the past30years as one of the mostinfluential figures in the contemporary British literary world. The1998Booker Prize for Amsterdam, with others, has gained him a reputation ofa great master of language. His skillful narrative techniques and uniquelyinsightful ethical understandings have made him “arguably the best livingBritish novelist”.The early works of Ian McEwan, mainly short stories, arecharacterized with tabooed subjects like incest, murder, sexual violenceand behavior degeneration, for which he was once given the nickname ofMacabre Ian. His later works, primarily novels, however, have shownconsiderable changes in their themes, which turn to address more seriousissues such as family lives, moral and ethical vulnerabilities, historicalinterpretations and cultural conflicts and so on. Up to now, he hascomposed nine masterpieces one after another, which include Amsterdamand Atonement, and he has been acclaimed as England’s national author.Since the1990s, McEwan’s works have been much studied in literary criticism. From differing perspectives and in varying approaches:psychoanalysis and narrative desires, for instance, scholars have analyzedhis works in such aspects as narrative styles and the fictional themes,which range from love and sex, family ethics, war trauma, culturalanxiety to historical impacts. It is believed that McEwan’s fiction, imbuedwith narrative experimentation such as deliberate fragmentariness in plotarrangements, and intertextual allusions, ethical dilemmas, has brokenthrough the confines of the British Isles in story settings and shows astrong interest in more immediate past of England. Ian McEwan is arepresentative of British post-war generation novelists.McEwan’s novels, indeed, are multidimensional with changing stylesover his long career, but retrospection of the British social reality after theSecond World War and perusal of the themes of his novels would lead usto the finding that CRISIS is the key word to the understandings ofBritish society and McEwan’s fiction. Readers can sort out in his mainnovels and short stories, at least, three types of crises: moral obligation,historical understandings and personal beliefs. Ian McEwan skillfullyemploys varying modern and post-modern narrative techniques to reveal, analyze and repudiate these crises from certain political, historical andphilosophic viewpoints.Post-war U. K. witnessed the decline of its national strength, andsuffered the strikes of the ensuing economic crises in the inflicting socialturmoil. These changes caused failing of the traditional values anddrastically lowered the general moral standards of the whole society. Inhis short stories, McEwan reproduces the sexually violent and abnormalscenarios of the British60’s and70’s social and family life. With the helpof collage and juxtaposition and other narrative space techniques, readers,would vision immediately in his texts the loss of Victorian valuesconcerning love. In Amsterdam, a thought-provoking novel, he makesgood use of carefully-arranged plots, abundant intertextual references andcontroversial professional ethics to probe and satirize the dark side ofhumanity such as paralysis of integrity, friendship and loyalty. In anothermuch-acclaimed novel, Atonement, by means of meta-fiction andcharacter contrast, McEwan demonstrates the difficulty and rarity ofpost-modern way of self-atonement through narrating in particular socialand ethical circumstances. Atonement enriches the ethical dimensions of the atonement novels ever written. These two novels prove that McEwanis adept at connecting brilliantly the public events and private life; what ismore, the development and ending of the stories reveal a streak ofhelplessness which is caused by permeating hypocrisy, insincerity andinsanity throughout every corner of the United Kingdom.The Twentieth Century was both an age of science and technology,and a time of massacre and concentration camps. As a result, the reviewand self-examination of the past century has been an important andpressing issue for the post-war intellectual communities. For the crisis ofhistorical understandings, McEewan reshapes the battleground and homefront of Dunkirk Evacuation from the perspective of Robbie Turner, theprotagonist of Atonement. On the basis of Roland Barthes’s the Doxa andthe Para-Doxa theory, McEwan deconstructs the suppressive andauthoritative discourse about Dunkirk Miracle through his poeticnarration, and refutes the definitive viewpoint that argues history isunique and uninterpretable. Whereas, in Black Dogs, by dint of unreliablenarration, McEwan tells readers articulately and objectively that Bernardand June, who are in love with each other but can not live together, have different memories of their shared history, namely, encounter of blackdogs from their own positions. Here McEwan wants to indicate thathistory is subjective and multi-dimensional, thus allows variedinterpretations.As a matter of fact, an introspection of the past also needs to examinethe confusing conflicts in values and beliefs such as confrontationsbetween rationality and non-rationality, democracy and totalitarianism. InBlack Dogs, McEwan sets June’s mysticism against Bernard’s rationalism,indicating that embracement of mysticism is another way of thinking indepth of modern civilization under the circumstances where rationalismhas strayed in post-modern context. As an artist, McEwan makes aprescription of “true love” for the crisis through depicting personal lifeexperiences of characters in the novel. By contrast, in Saturday, McEwanfocuses on the contemporary crisis of the world, and he portrays the waythe free society experiences life, cherishes freedom and democracy, andreflects on the paradoxical view of violence against violence under thethreat of terrorism. The novel highlights the limitations and incapacitationof modern liberalism. In short, the summary of McEwan’s writing career enables us tounderstand that in his works of different themes, either tabooed subjects,or family life, political topics and war stories, he reveals directly orindirectly the past and present crises of U. K. and even Europe, with hissingular artistic vision and extraordinary expressive force. He keeps awatchful eye on humanity, criticizing and ridiculing sins and evils,commending and praising implicitly truth and good, and exploring deeplythe gray areas of the innermost heart. He also pays close attention tohistorical interpretations and values and beliefs, with full understandingsof confusion and disagreements between rationalism and non-rationalism,grand narratives and “small histories”, liberalism and terrorism.Searchingly and vividly, McEwan, however, reconstructs these political,social and even survival crises in these complex propositions. All of theseshow that with an extremely high sense of artistic mission and socialresponsibility, McEewan always bears righteousness and humanistic carein his soul and carries forward the great tradition of British novels;therefore he indeed deserves the title of Britain’s national author.