Abstract：Abstract: Modern philosophy questions the author’s subjective cognition, representation, moral senses and judgments, which leads to the crisis of the author’s writing subject. Iris Murdoch, a British novelist and philosopher, critiques the concept “self” within modern philosophies, emphasizes the author’s subjectivity and the morality of literary imagination, thus shaping unique narrative ethics. Combining images of writing subjects in Murdoch’s three novels of the artist, this paper explores Murdoch’s narrative ethics from three aspects: the origin, delusion and strategy of reconstructing writing subject, revealing her philosophical reflection on the concept “self”, her theoretical critique upon images of the self, and her literary imagination on self-transformation of writing subjects. The paper points out that Murdoch constructs narrative ethics with “unselfing” as its core and emphasizes the morality of literary creation through reshaping the self, restoring the connection among the self, language and the world, and reconstructing writing subject with the consciousness of the other.
Key words: Iris Murdoch; narrative ethics; self; writing subject; moral philosophy
