J.M.Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarian attempts to explore torture as well as the ethical choices and ethical responsibilities of characters under torture as its focused theme.Faced with the evil caused by imperial power,soldiers,as the members within the system,blindly obey authority,losing their ethical awareness to distinguish between good and evil and right and wrong,which leads to ano-mie of their ethical responsibilities.As a crowd of onlookers cheering,the townspeople collectively fall into moral paralysis and mental slackness,and become rabbles who are divorced from rationality,losing moral judgment and collude with evil.However,the old magistrate,who is also a member of the empire,sticks to his humanity in the extreme ethical environment and chooses to break with the imperial regime,resisting"the banality of evil"with conscience and thinking,and bravely assuming the ethical responsibility for the indigenous Other.The different ethical choices of the characters re-flect Coetzee's deep contemplation on human being.His promotion of individual ethical responsibility guides us how to choose when facing the universal ethical dilemma of mankind,which highlights the value and significance of his ethical writing.
J.M.CoetzeeWaiting for the Barbariansethical choicesthe ethical responsibility
万方数据
维普
