The Study Of The Middle Class Crisis In Ian McEwan’s Novels

With the continuous advancement of industrial civilization and the rapid development of modern society,there are many complex social problems that human race need to face while they possess unprecedented wealth.Ian McEwan has keenly grasped the sense of uneasiness and crisis of the middle class in the social and historical changes.By describing middle class life comprehensively,it shows the struggle when the mankind face crisis in the modern context,revealing the powerlessness of the spiritual crisis faced by the rationalism and the danger of lossing faith.This thesis discusses the middle class crisis in McEwan’s novels in three chapters by selecting three representative works of his,Saturday,Solar and The Children Act.The first chapter explains the specific performance of the middle class crisis in the three novels:the family crisis,the trust crisis and the value crisis.The second chapter is divided into two parts.The first part summarizes the three characteristics of the crisis,which are passivation,persistence,and routineization.The second part focuses on the reasons for the crisis.The advent of globalization has made personal crises inevitably integrated with global crises.At the same time,the traditional rupture has caused peopled crisis in the spiritual and moral fields.The third chapter discusses Ian McEwan’s two ways of solving the crises,that is,to soothe the anxiety through love and goodness,and to reconstruct the aesthetic world with art.The crisis suffered by Ian McEwan’s middle class not only represents a personal crisis,but also a crisis that Western society and the entire human civilization are experiencing.The description of the daily crisis of the middle class reflects the writer’s solicitous attitude towards people and the world.