The Ethics Thought In The "american Trilogy" Of Philip Roth

Philip Millton Roth (1933—) is the outstanding representative of Jewish writer of theUnited States Jewish literature, as well as one of the most famous scholar style writersin the contemporary literature circles of U.S.A. Philip Roth is highly considered as theNobel Literature Prize Winner among the voices recently, also he is known as the“3L”writer--Living Literary LegendAt the end of20thcentury, Roth launched three masterpieces in succession: AmericanPastoral (1997), I Married a communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000); theseworks usually are defined as Roth’s second trilogy——United States trilogy. As asystematic and coherent whole,“United States trilogy” contains a wealthy content andmeaning, tells the customs records and spiritual history during the period from theMcCarthy white terror in the50s, the Vietnam War in60s and70s to the Clinton sexscandal in the90s in last century.These three works are the object of study in this paper. The aim of this paper is todiscover the “United States trilogy” of ethics by the application of ethical literarycriticism method combined with the historical, social research methods on the basis ofchewing over the texts.Five chapters are included in this paper. The first chapter is to describe the life andwritings of Roth, overview Roth’s study situation at home and abroad, and point out thepurpose of this study and methods applied. The second chapter interprets “United Statestrilogy” of family ethics conflict by discussing on ethics betrayed husband and wife andintergenerational ethics of fission. The historical method is applied in third chapter toseparately discuss the respectively political and historical background from themicro-perspective, so as to reflect the political ethics of the novels which are full ofirony. From the macro perspective of history, society and culture,the fourth chapteranalysis the contains of the social and ethical tragedy in “United States trilogy”. Thefifth chapter is the final one which is to conclude this paper, summarize the author’screation and the overall context of this paper.