A Study On Clive Linley's Ethical Identities In Amsterdam

Ian McEwan is one of the best-known and most controversial figures in contemporary British literary world with a number of studies on him and his works.However,his Amsterdam,the Booker Winner in 1998,is studied much less than his other works while the novella inherits McEwan's trend of pitting characters against crises and twists of fate,which incorporates McEwan's ethical thinking on contemporary British society.Amsterdam tells a story of how Clive Linley and his best friend Vernon Halliday become deadly enemies from close friends,and how Clive turns into an immoral loser from a respectful and famed musician because of a series of events,exploring the contemporary British social crises and the existence of the so-called civilized society.Clive's ethical identity variations are closely related to his ethical dilemmas,and what Clive confronts is the same with the generation he represents.The thesis starts from the variations of Clive ethical identities,exploring the reasons of the variations and the writer's ethical intentions behind the variations.The thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One analyzes Clive's variations of three ethical identities of Clive being concerned with Molly,Vernon,and his own career,including the normal ethical state in thenovella for these identities,the weirdness of Clive's ethical state for the related identity,and the ethical dilemmas that accelerate his variations.Chapter Two focuses on the internal and external reasons for his ethical identity variations,with the internal reasons as dislocations of ethical identities and weakness of ethical value,and the external reason as the corrupted ethical environment.Chapter Three is about McEwan's ethical intentions behind Clive's ethical identity variations,including McEwan's anxiety about the familial ethical crisis,satire on the so-called civilized society and the appeal for ethical reconstruction.In conclusion,Clive can never find a way out except death in such a world.In the end,sucked in illusion,Clive happily dies in the dream of being successful and being forgiven.The same ethical crises also exist in contemporary people.Thus McEwan makes the reader think about that how those people trapped into ethical crises can find out a solution to rebuild a palace of faith and ethics based on the intersection of ideal and reality.