Ethical Chaos And Reconstruction Of Order

The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the 2014 Man Booker Prize,and its author Richard Flanagan became the third to win this prize in Australian literary history.He has been gaining considerable fame throughout the world ever since.Besides The Narrow Road to the Deep North,Flanagan’s works also include Death of a River Guide,The Unknown Terrorist,Wanting,etc.The novel is based on the real historical events of Japan’s commandeering of war prisoners to build the Thai-Burma railway during World War II.It takes the life experiences of Dorrigo,an Australian military doctor captured by Japanese army,as the main line to show the ethical relationships at different levels,as well as the arduous journey from ethical chaos to order.The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a novel preoccupied with ethical issues,such as infidelity,age-gap marriage,ethnic relationship and inter-generational relationship.Through the lives of people of different races,genders and ages,it vividly presents individuals’ ethical selections under special ethical circumstances.Drawing on both ethical literary criticism practiced by Chinese scholars such as Nie Zhenzhao and Levinas’ s ethics of other,this paper tries to reveal the underlying ethical themes in the novel and the ethical tendencies of the author Richard Flanagan.This paper consists of six chapters.Chapter one provides a brief account of Flanagan,his literary achievements,the plots and researches on The Narrow Road to the Deep North.Chapter two mainly introduces ethical literary criticism,its origin,definition,development as well as Levinas’ s ethics of other.Chapter three takes the variation in ethical relationship between the sexes,the hostility between different races and the consequences caused by such disharmonious relationships as the starting point,and comes to the conclusion that the writer Flanagan advocates the harmonious coexistence between the subject and the other.Chapter four analyzes the unbalanced human-society relationship.It points out that society’s excessive indifference to and suppression on individuals’ will and ability would be likely to cause destruction of social order by individuals.Chapter five focuses on the Australian officerDorrigo and the Japanese officer Nakamura after the war and discusses the complicated human-self ethical relationship.In the end,both of them jumped out of the ethical predicaments and reconciled with themselves once they awakened to their ethical consciousness and assumed of the ethical responsibility to others.The last chapter summarizes the arguments of the whole paper that the individuals’ ethical demands cannot be ignored,but the realization of one’s value needs to be combined with social ethical norms on the basis of respecting the other.Furthermore,this chapter holds that this novel reveals Flanagan’s ethical pursuits for harmony,balance and unity,which is helpful for people to deal with different layers of relationships in today’s society.