An-other Human Prospect In Time

As one magnum opus of Ian Mc Ewan,the “national writer” of England,The Child in Time well demonstrates the authorial contemplation upon the living circumstances of postmodern individuals.Yet regrettably,notwithstanding that the mainstream critics in academia both home and abroad generally lay their finger on the image of adult in close relation to that of child,the kidnapping of whom initiates the body narrative,few further their research onto the territory of the loss of belongingness,a spiritual predicament that fashions the postmodern epoch.Therefore,within the novel’s horizon,this thesis intends to fathom the theme of belongingness by diving into its relation to time.Specifically,taking as the entry point the ethical identity of the self and the other,this thesis draws from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to facilitate the reinterpretation of concepts such as belongingness,time,child and home that unexceptionally pertain to self-other relationships,and intends to offer a prudently subversive approach to the theme of belongingness.Chapter One centers around the dual existential status of adult individuals,namely,the egoistic selves and the silenced others,so as to unveil the causal relation between egoism/totalitarianism and the loss of belongingness in the adult world,by way of which it also lays bare the dual connotations of child as the egoistic and the instrumentalized,and sheds some light on the dialogue between belongingness and time,with special attention drawn to the essential similarity between adult egoism and the dislocation in the personal time.Chapter Two focuses on the event of homecoming.Probing from the perspective of self-other relationship,the feminine other in this case,it looks skeptically at the characterization and ethical impact of the latter to further scrutinize the nature of Charles’ and Stephen’s homecomings respectively,which foregrounds the significance of otherness and further clarifies the dialogue between belongingness and time.Specifically,it deviates from preceding scholarly accounts that attribute the former’s regression to childhood to the pursuit of innocence.Instead,a dive into the ethical connotation of the reconstructed homeostasis well characterizes it as a pursuit of belongingness and essentially the reinforcement of egoism;while the time travel the latter encounters is essentially the self’s ethical growth under the impact of otherness.The pursuit of belongingness in both cases,as perceptibly,proves to be a process of self-relocation in the personal time,that is,a process of self-making.Chapter Three examines how the novelist generalizes the parent-child relationship by revealing the socio-political domain as an extension or replicate of home in an ethical sense that reasonably leads to a reinterpretation of the title “The Child in Time”.Firstly,this chapter looks at two analogous mother-son relationships to further analyze the spiritual predicament of individuals,the authorial critiques of which open to the novelist’s own oscillation between the individual and politics.It then scrutinizes the similarity between the image of father and child on an ethical ground that unveils the essential of the personal time as ethical relationships.Based on the analysis of father images,it reinterprets the theme by looking into the dialogue between belongingness and time,which also serves as a clear manifestation of the novelist’s envisagement of a future ethical u-topia.In a nutshell,this thesis probes from the perspective of self-other relationship and takes a subtle stance to center on the dialogue between belongingness and time.By disenchanting the notion of “time” in a prudently subversive fashion,it broadens the interpretive spectrum of belongingness,and reveals in all manifestations Mc Ewan’s deepest concern about the fate of postmodern individuals and his thought-provoking enquiry on humanity.