Ethical Concern In This Sporting Life

David Storey(1933-2017)is a famous contemporary British novelist and dramatist.Most of his works focus on the working class in the 1950 s and 1960 s,exploring the relationship between the physical and the spiritual,and expressing ethical concerns for social issues.This Sporting Life(1960),Storey’s first and best-known work,is a first-person account of Arthur Machin’s story—a worker in an industrial city in north Britain,who tries to change his class status by becoming a rugby player but ends up in failure.Adopting Professor Nie Zhenzhao’s ethical literary criticism,this thesis returns to the ethical environment of sport in Britain,exploring Storey’s ethical concerns for working-class sportsmen’s professional and personal life.This thesis begins with a comparison between the ethical norms in British tradition and those in the 1950 s.The external reason for their differences is the commercialization of sport,while the internal cause is the conflict in ethical norms between the upper-middle class and working class,which lead to the ethical issues about sportsmen and the management of sport.Then,the thesis analyzes their embodiment of them in This Sporting Life.In Arthur’s professional life,his ethical identity as a sportsman is dissimilated into a “toy” for the bourgeoisie and a “Tarzan” to the spectator.With his diminishing human factor and his growing animal factor,he violates the professional ethics of sportsmen.In his personal life,he suffers from the alienation of his parents and lover due to ethical conflict.He struggles to adapt to the utilitarian ethics of the middle class and abandons the moral ethics of his working-class parents.What’s more,Arthur equates his love with passion and sexual love,which is a kind of natural emotion without moral restraint,while Mrs.Hammond appeals for selfless love,which belongs to moral emotion.The thesis offers a new interpretation of This Sporting Life in the light of ethical literary criticism,probing into Storey’s ethical concern.Through Arthur’s experience of becoming a rugby player,Storey reveals that sport is dissimilated as a shortcut to social mobility and criticizes that the commercialization of sports erodes the professional ethics and the moral values of sportsmen.Storey appeals for the construction of a harmonious and fair ecological environment for competitive sports,and he emphasizes the moral function of sports and the moral cultivation of athletes.