Narrative Ethics in Half a Life

Classical narratology which completely separates the relationship between the text and the context or readers only pays attention to the research of the form of narrative works. Combining the respective advantages of narratology and ethics, narrative ethics not only pays attention to the relationship between text content and ideology, but also focuses more on the interactive relationship between narrative form and ideology. This paper mainly explores the narrative ethics in Naipaul’s Half a Life from the perspectives of story ethics and narrative ethics. The story ethics includes the caste ethics, the racial ethics and the marriage ethics, while the narrative ethics mainly covers the interaction between the ethical attitude and the three items: the personal mechanism, the narrator intervention and the narrative structure.