Narrative, ethics, and the cunning of form

This thesis is a critique of narrative ethics. It examines how an ethical model can be extracted from narrative, how such a model can be used to render experience narratively ethical, and how this application introduces a set of ethical problems as it mediates social antagonism. The study shows how appealing to narrativity—the condition, produced by narrative practice, of experiential continuity, self-constancy, and acknowledgment of subjection away from political conflict towards antagonism with a transcendental Other. Because narrative discourse conceptualizes historical relations and because narrative sustains critical discourses through which such relations can be assessed and judged, a critique of narrative ethics also scrutinizes the ethics of historical consciousness. By exposing how narrative concepts underwrite key notions in ethics, particularly authority, responsibility, and discipline, the thesis seeks to clarify the historical effectiveness of ethical discourse. The purpose of the thesis is neither to determine whether ethical appeals to narrativity are justified nor to propose an alternative ethical regime. The objectives are to describe the consciousness sustained by narrative and to examine what happens when the function of narrative ethics in social discourse can be recognized.; Chapters one and two use structuralist concepts and techniques to characterize the way narrative ethics or the ethics of narrativity figures in a range of forms, including Homeric epic, Platonic dialogue, biblical history, and Attic drama. Chapters three, four, and five explore how narrative ethics complicates modernist texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner. Each writer considers the possibility of resisting narrative ethical demands for conformity and for obedience, and each writer embraces a different strategy for surviving the historical dangers to which subjects are exposed by aspiring to ethical freedom. Nabokov works from a commitment to the real, Stein takes refuge in analytical thinking, and Faulkner stages the necessity of ethical submission. By examining both theory and literature, the thesis seeks to problematize the privilege granted to ethics in critical and cultural discourses.