Race,Love,War-Understanding The Human Stain From The Perspective Of Narrative Ethics

As a Jewish-American writer,Philip Roth(1933-2018)wrote with political agenda and literary commitment through his practice of language and exercise of language,constantly inspiring readers in terms of ethical influences this agency might generate.Though never acknowledging openly being a Jewish-American writer,nevertheless,Roth stood in the field of Jewish-American literature with one hand clutching tightly the fertile Jewish soil and the other hand mining the rich material beneath the American land.Many of his fictions revolved around the semi-biographical themes,concentrating on the ethical conflicts in his Jewish-American life experience.The Human Stain,the conclusion to his famous American trilogy,is a typical presentation of the unnerving,ironic,and tragic ethical paradox existing in an individual's life,including conflicts between racial discrimination and political correctness,inappropriate love and social moral sanction,war trauma and patriotism.Roth undertook the mission to show readers the impact of society on himself and people around him,reconstructed the stories he believed in through the tactic narrative techniques,and stroke individual readers' mental chord to ponder on the social issues hidden in the story.The thesis mainly concentrates on the analysis of the book The Human Stain from the perspective of narrative ethics,which contains the narrative ethics at the story level and the one at the narrating level.Basically,the thesis is composed of five parts– the Introduction,the three Chapters constituting the bulk of the paper,and the Conclusion.The Introduction part first gives a brief introduction to the author Philip Roth and then reviews the criticism of his book The Human Stain both at home and abroad in an effort to better understand the background of the writer and his book.Chapter one offers insight into the development of narrative ethical criticism which could trace back to the moral criticism in the ancient Greek as well as the general concept of narrative ethics by referring to several most eminent scholars and their ideas in this academic field.Chapter two,focusing on the narrative ethics at the story level,discusses three main ethical conflicts appearing in the fiction as well asRoth's ethical tendency towards these conflicts.Chapter three,concentrating on the narrative ethics at the narrating level,endeavors to analyze the narrative techniques Philip Roth takes advantage of to convey his ethical intentions.Different choices of narrative focalization as well as narrative time convey Roth's ethical choice which is to violate the traditional hierarchical ethical order and to seek the true equality and inner freedom of individuals in the modern society.And through the analysis of implied author and the dynamic interactions between the real author and the implied author,readers could actually grasp the ethical stance the real author holds in the writing process.The last part,the Conclusion,mainly draws attention to the ultimate aim of narrative ethics perspective which is to convey the author's ethical standpoints,and through the analyzing technique,to accompany readers who are suffering in similar miserable situations during the process of reading with a modern fairy tale of pain and hope combined.