On The Narrative Ethics In An Artist Of The Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World is an early masterpiece by Kazuo Ishiguro.Set in Nagasaki,Japan,this novel is narrated by retired painter Ono in his diary as he looks back at what happened.Ono was once a supporter for Japanese militarism,but the defeat of Japan in second world war and the military occupation of Japan caused sudden changes in mainstream values.Hence,Ono,both a spokesman of “old Japan” and a passive recipient of “new Japan”,begins to re-examine his life.This thesis,taking narrative ethics in James Phelan’s rhetorical narrative as its theoretical perspective,attempts to explore how Ishiguro constructs some main ethical issues through character interaction,narrative techniques and textual design,and tries to disclose how readers reconstruct such ethical issues in their reading and how this comes to influence readers’ previous ethical positions toward a same issue.This thesis includes five chapters.Chapter one provides a brief introduction to Kazuo Ishiguro and An Artist of the Floating World;an overview of the general research condition of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works;a demonstration of James Phelan’s narrative ethics,a significant part of his rhetorical narrative.Then the feasibility and research values of this thesis will be put forward.Chapter two,three and four are the main body,which will study family ethics,social ethics and individual ethics respectively,three principal issues about ethics that grow increasingly complex in protagonist Ono’s whole life.To be specific,each chapter will take narrative ethics as an analysis tool,and come to explore ethics of “the told”,“the telling” and “the reading”;besides,efforts will also be given to uncover how these different ethical positions are constructed through concrete means.Chapter five will be the conclusion part,which will bring to surface the complex ethics and the interaction between narrative and ethics in the novel with the help of rhetorical narrative ethics.The research results of this thesis are summarized as follows.In terms of each ethical issue,Ishiguro succeeds to deliver various ethics with different methods.At the story level,Ishiguro takes characters as the media to show their different ethical orientations by focusing on their languages,attitudes and behaviors;then at the discourse level,Ishiguro relies on his control of character narrator and implied author to construct different ethics.His control of character narrator contains his varying emphasis on the narrator’s narrator functions and disclosure function,as well as his arrangement of progression,etc.;while his control of implied author includes his application of narrative techniques such as first-person perspective,arrangement of time and space,and double-voice speech.Finally,at the reading level,Ishiguro invites readers into his carefully waved narrative,encourages readers to reconstruct and evaluate ethics existing in the story and discourse level,and eventually motivates readers to make a comparison of their own ethical views with the one constructed,so as to develop an ethical orientation of their own after careful reading and pondering.