Writing Of The Other And Ethical Choice In Banville’s Frames Trilogy

John Banville(1945-)is a leading contemporary Irish writer whose works contain a deep concern with the reality of Ireland.The Frames Trilogy is his transformative work,which explores the key role of “the other” in the protagonist Freddie’s thoughts and actions through his retrospective account of a murder case and his constant search for redemption.It also delves into the individual’s identity crisis and ethical choices in a turbulent social context.This article argues that there are three narrative threads mutually interacting in the Frames Trilogy.The first thread is Freddie’s writing of “the other”,which refers to both social order and other people.The writing style undergoes changes from negation to fabrication and to reconstruction.The second thread is the transformation of Freddie’s personal situation influenced by different ways of writing “the other”: from an exile to a home-seeker and to a nomad,all emphasizing different aspects of his identity.The exile emphasizes his evasion and resistance to the native ethical environment,the home-seeker highlights his yearning for a place to stay after committing crimes,and the nomad stresses his transition between two identities.The third thread is the different ethical choices made by Freddie to construct his identity in these three different situations.Using ethical literary criticism method and combining Freddie’s varying ways of writing “the other” in different periods,this article analyzes how his writing interacts with ethical choices to promote the reconstruction of Freddie’s identity.Finally,the article summarizes Banville’s observation of reality and national identity reflection demonstrated in his writing on “the other”.The introduction mainly introduces the life and literary creation of the research subject John Banville,outlines the research situation of Banville’s works in China and abroad,elaborates the reasons,research methods,research significance and interpretation of key terms “the other” and “writing of the other” in this thesis.In the main body,the first three chapters focus on the discussion of the narrator Freddie’s writing of the other.Chapter four firstly analyzes the indications and ethical significance of the transformation of the narrator’s writing of the other,and then explores the author Banville’s reflection and ethical wisdom manifested through the writing of the murderer Freddie as “the other”.The first chapter takes The Book of Evidence as the research object,analyzing how Freddie’s negation of “the other” in his writing led him,as an exile,into a state of identity anxiety,and further exploring the ethical choices he made to alleviate this anxiety.Firstly,Freddie negated “the other” on both the levels of social structure and other people,which ultimately led to his murder and self-destruction,causing him to fall into a contradictory state of being an exile in the mental realm.Secondly,as an exile,Freddie became trapped in the identity anxiety of questioning “who am I”.However,the act of murder caused him to lose the key ethical identity and become disconnected from society,leading to a situation of self-alienation.To resolve this dilemma,Freddie ultimately made an ethical choice to seek goodness,attempting to reconstruct himself through repentance.This ethical choice,in turn,led to a transformation in Freddie’s way of writing about “the other”.Chapter two takes Ghosts as the research object,exploring the desire for a spiritual home behind Freddie’s fabrication of “the other” to seek compensation.Freddie becomes a home-seeker constantly searching for his own identity in the imaginary world.Finally,he makes an ethical choice to seek the truth.First of all,the entire text is a daydream constructed by Freddie in prison,reflecting his fictionalization of “the other” on both the societal and interpersonal levels.On the one hand,Freddie constructs a “dream within a dream”,forming a triadic projection structure of reality to Imaginary World A to Imaginary World B.On the other hand,throughout the imaginary world,he fictionalizes ghosts and others to achieve atonement.Secondly,behind this compensation lies Freddie’s desire to rebuild his spiritual home after losing it.This desire can also be divided into two levels according to the structure of the “dream within a dream”.The first is to seek a spiritual mother in the Imaginary World A to rebuild his ethical identity,and the second is to explore new life forms in the Imaginary World B to construct it as his spiritual home.However,this fictionalization reflects Freddie’s psychological mechanism of seeking compensation,causing him to face a choice of becoming an “artistic life” or returning to reality.Freddie ultimately makes an ethical choice to seek the truth and deconstruct the imaginary world.The third chapter takes Athena as the research object,and analyzes how Freddie’s reconstructive writing of “the other” makes him a nomad,trapped in the dilemma of identity construction,and then explores the ethical choice he makes to resolve the dilemma.After returning to human society,Freddie changed his name to Morrow and hoped for the future.However,the two women A and Aunt Corky,constitute the two faces of “the absolute other”,respectively representing the past and reality.They call Freddie on behalf of the past and reality respectively,putting Freddie’s self-identity construction in a dilemma.Faced with this conflict,art once again becomes “the other” that allows Freddie to discover his own alienation and drives him to make an ethical choice,to reconstruct his own identity and subjectivity through the social order represented by the police and the metaphor of art,in the coexistence with “the other”.Chapter 4 takes the transmutation of the writing of the other in the Frames Trilogy as research object,and analyzes the ethical significance of the writing of the other on two different levels from the narrator to the author.On the one hand,the transformation process of Freddie’s writing of the other is also a process of discovering the uniqueness and otherness of “the other”,so his writing is an ethical choice,reflecting the ethical meaning of the novel;on the other hand,Banville creates the character of Freddie by combining the real case of Ireland.Banville also makes his own ethical choice to write about “the other”,not to defend such behavior,but to reflect on the predicament of the times.In this way,Banville not only extends from the writing of the other to the questioning of individual existence,but also shows his forward-looking thinking about Irishness,reflecting Banville’s ethical wisdom.The concluding section summarizes and concludes the contents of this paper,placing the writing of the other in the Frames Trilogy into the context of Irish cultural traditions,and explaining the reasons and significance of Banville’s concern with “the other”.The protagonists in Banville’s works often start from their own ghostly situation,perceiving the disconnection between themselves and the world and feeling the absurdity of the world,and Freddie is a prominent representative of them,reflecting Banville’s concern for the present and future of the Irish nation.In addition,Banville’s writing of the other implies a search for ethical identification,including both the characters’ identification with the existence of ethics and the mechanism of ethical operation within the text,and the readers’ identification with the ethical revelation expressed in the text,but this process of identification is long and difficult.In the postmodern context,human beings face various crises caused by the capitalist economy and other problems,and “the other” has become one of the key points for examining these crises.The use of ethical literary criticism provides a new path for reunderstanding the ethical inspiration of fiction,and at the same time also raises new questions and challenges.