Ethical Interpretation Of The Cement Garden From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Stylistics

British novelist Ian McEwan, from publishing his first short stories collection in1975, has been sparing thirty years on redefining what the darkness is, and exploring sadist and masochist, abnormal sex, as well as surreal plot. Released in 1978, Ian McEwan's first novel The Cement Garden is one of his two “small masterpieces”. It attracted much attention once came out. Living in an isolated environment surrounded by wilderness, four children are out of control, and go through tragedies beyond normal ethics.Resorting to Systemic Functional Stylistics and retrieval and statistical functions of UAM Corpus Tool, this thesis takes a thorough analysis on ethical issues of The Cement Garden, to expose characters' ethical flaws in parental relationship, sibling relationship and social relationship. On the one hand, it is to fulfill the existing academic achievement that combining ethical study with Systemic Functional Stylistics is a new perspective; on the other hand, it brings people to pay attention to ethical issues in the modern world, especially to help adolescents to form ethical values and in the end to establish a healthy ethical society.Due to Ian McEwan's works' shocking themes like murder, incest, and sexual abuse, etc., many scholars have realized the ethical values of his works. Setting its foundation on the Systemic Functional Linguistics, Systemic Functional Stylistics possesses ingenious explanatory power on figures' analysis. Applying three metafunctions in Systemic Functional Stylistics can magnify the shortcomings of human being, and protrude their relationships: using Transitivity System to take an objective exploration on clauses and to dissect character's statements, actions,psychology and circumstantial element around; using Mood and Modality system to point out the subjective attitudes of character; using marked theme in Thematic Structure to highlight the initial part of one's thought or utterance, and to expose character's focus of attention. Through a quantitative analysis on language in the novel, Transitivity System, Mood and Modality system and Thematic Structure canunearth characters' deep thoughts systematically behind superficial appearance.Systemic Functional Stylistics is an effective and powerful tool to reveal characters' personalities and their relationships and to interpret ethical problems. In The Cement Garden, family members have little communication and live isolated.Autocratic Father and coward Mother are hard to make an harmonious atmosphere in the family and to help children to establish ethical values. Children's indifference and ignorance to family affection, severe distortion to sibling relationship and deviated cognition to social interaction urge readers to confront the horrors existing in contemporary urban civilization, and to explore social ethical predicaments.