本文是一篇伦理学论文，费兰提出的叙事伦理包括叙事伦理、叙事伦理、阅读伦理和写作伦理，这为我们分析小说提供了一个边界。具体而言，叙事伦理不仅关注故事文本所体现的道德价值，而且关注叙事技巧的特殊形式。本文分别从故事、话语和作者三个层面探讨了低地小说的伦理价值，揭示了低地小说的伦理意蕴。
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Literature Review
Jhumpa Lahiri, one of the most famous contemporary Indian American writer, has beenstudied by many scholars both at home and abroad. In general, researches on Jhumpa Lahiri’novels mainly focus on her first full-length novel The Namesake and the collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Land. Few scholastic papers could befound about The Lowland. Among all the related researches in early years, introductions andreviews about Lahiri’s works took a large part. In recent years, a number of holistic studiesabout Lahiri’s literary works has mainly been conducted from the perspectives of feminism,and diaspora. Besides, a variety of new research methods have also sprung up, which includeethical literary criticism, orientalism, trauma and so on. In other words, recent researches onLahiri’s works at home and abroad are more diversified in all respects.
Previous studies on Lahiri’s works mainly focus on The Namesake and her twocollections of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. Mostscholars choose to interpret her works from the perspective of feminism. In the works ofLahiri, the female characters are mostly the representative female figures that come from apatriarchal country and choose to migrate to a totally unfamiliar land with their husbands. Inthis new territory, they are isolated by social activities and cut off the actual relationship withtheir homeland. Therefore in this new world, on the one hand, they are affected by the alienideas and culture, on the other hand they lose their own discourse power, make every effort toseek the connection between their homeland and themselves, and struggle to make a changeto achieve the equality with their husband, which is exactly the symbols of feminism chasinggender equality and self-empowerment. Feng Huan explores the living condition and identityissues of Mrs Sen, emphasizing the dilemma of female immigrants who are under thepressure of society and patriarchy.
1.2 An Introduction to James Phelan’s Theory of Narrative Ethics
“Narration, when coming to its origin, can find its trace in Plato’s The Republic at theearliest. Hereafter, the development and study of the narratology has been subordinated toliterary criticism or literary rhetoric, and has no independent status of its own until the birthof the classical narratology in 1960s” (Shen, “Narratology” 60). In the 1960s, France becamethe birthplace of the classical narratology, then it spread to other countries, becoming aninternational research discipline. In terms of classical narratology, we definitely couldn’tignore two schools of formalism in the 20th century, namely, Russian formalism andStructuralism. Both Structuralism and Russian formalism regard literature as a self-containedsystem with internal laws, and focus on the relationships among its internal components andelements, thus greatly influencing classical narratology.
In such cases, classical narratology distracts their attention from the outside of the text,instead turns into the inside of the text, and focuses on the relations between the text structureand different factors, aspiring to discover a universal narrative grammar underlying allnarratives. However, classical narratology goes so far that it goes to the other extreme. It onlyfocuses on the story being told and the narrative discourse that has been used in the context,neglects the function of reader and author, and severs the connection between the society,history as well as cultural background to varying degrees, which definitely brings its own limitations.
Chapter Two Ethical Values on the Level of Story
2.1 Ethical Dilemma Faced by Main Characters
Lahiri constructs story’s progression by intertwining two sets of instabilities: theNaxalbari movement and Udayan’s death,
