This paper takes narrative ethics as the approach to analyze ethical dimensions of the tensions between self-narrative and other-narrative in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, and indicates that self-narrative represents the protagonist’s appeal of identity construction, other-narrative symbolizes external forces deconstructing his identity, and narrative reconciliation between self-narrative and other-narrative represents possibilities of his identity construction. Representational ethics shows that Herzog’s self-narrative attempts to construct identity through fictionalizing ideal self at the expense of real self, then to consolidate new identities by assimilating the absolute other. However, narrational ethics suggests that other-narrative represents the absolute other’s deconstruction of new identities constructed by Herzog’s subjective intention, and puts all new constructed identities into suspension. Identity reconstruction can be possible only when Herzog faces the gap between real self and ideal self, confronts existence of the absolute other, responds to its ethical call, and actualizes reconciliation between self-narrative and other narrative. Besides, hermeneutic ethics indicates that the reader also has a role to play in Herzog’s process of identity construction due to tensions between self-narrative and other-narrative, which bestows the reader with constantly switched ethical positions and distances from the text, thus makes the reader’s responsibility towards the text an infinite movement.
Iris Murdoch is a renowned female novelist and philosopher in the 20th century English literature. In her literary creation, she has a preference for male narration and holds a reserved attitude to women's movements with reluctance to be considered as a feminist writer, which permits her realistic depiction of female characters and dispassionate thought on women's problems. This paper, with the interpretation and redefinition of the concepts as consciousness, identity, and self in Murdoch's philosophy, analyzes the fragmented self of three female figures inThe Flight from the Enchanter (1956) respectively from the perspectives of self-consciousness, identity, and self and reveals that the fragmentation of female selfhood is mainly due to the overwhelming male dominance in the gender relationship.
This paper is devoted to examine the reconstruction of female selfhood from the aspect of the growth of female self-consciousness in a changed and revised world through the quest for female self-awareness as an individual in Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Through the analysis of Iris Murdoch's comparative characterization of the siblings Hilda and Morgan, the paper reveals that the social and economic changes in the modern world and all kinds of women's liberation movements will necessarily lead to the improved situation of women if they have no capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile themselves as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. Compared with Morgan's emotional perplexity, economic hardship, and male contempt, Hilda's affluent life, happy marriage and her popularity among the male indicate Murdoch's reluctant admission that women still live in the androcentric world where the women's self-improvement are not widely welcome.
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