A Study Of Narrative Ethics In Sing,Unburied,Sing

Jesmyn Ward,who won National Book Award twice for her novels Salvage the Bones(2011)and Sing,Unburied Sing(2017),is a fresh new voice in African-American literature.Her works are known for magical realism,profoundly reflecting the poor life of the black in America's rural South,In Ward's literary works,it is not difficult to find that ethical issues have always been her major concern,and she is very good at conveying relevant ethical implications through eloquent narrative.Therefore,interpreting Ward's novels from the perspective of narrative ethics is of high value.As a road novel,Sing Unburied,Sing explores the deep effects of racism and injustice on several generations of a black family in the rural South of America.This novel breaks the boundaries between the past and the present,between the living and the dead,and conveys to the readers various ethical positions underlying racism in American society.This thesis takes James Phelan's narrative ethics as the theoretical basis to explore ethical values underlying the African Americans,ethical implications underlying narrative forms and the actual author's ethical obligations in authorial writing.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter,serving as the introduction part of this thesis,introduces Jesmyn Ward and her novel Sing Unburied,Sing,literature review and the theory of James Phelan's narrative ethics.The second chapter,based on Phelan's "the ethics of the told",reveals the ethical deficiency in contemporary American society,that is,the problems of racial tensions and racial violence,and explores the characters' ethical values on some major issues like death,survival and love in the context of racism.The third chapter,resorting to Phelan's "the ethics of the telling",interprets the ethical implications underlying the narrative forms,i.e.the ethical dimension of the various narrative skills adopted,including the use of value-laden words,the employment of diverse narrative voices,and the intricate design of story structure,in the hope of exploring the ethics of the narrator and the implied author.The fourth chapter,in terms of Phelan's"the ethics of the writing",analyzes the ethical obligations of the authorial writing,hoping to figure out the ethical responsibility of the actual author Jesmyn Ward in making choices about where the story takes place,who are the characters,and why telling supernatural stories.The fifth chapter is a summary,summarizing the findings of the thesis,Interpreting Sing Unburied Sing from the aspects of "the ethics of the told","the ethics of telling" and "the ethics of writing" through James Phelan's narrative ethics can deeply explore the ethical dimension of this novel in both story and discourse level as well as the ethical intention of its author.It's not hard to find that this novel has achieved successful communication between author,text and reader through "a beautifully taut narrative".