The Moral and Ethical Dimensions of the Contemporary British Novel: Ian Mcewan’s Vision

Abstract

This article studies the portrayal in contemporary British novels of the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by individuals in a post-humanist world. Over the last thirty years of his creative career, Ian McEwan has demonstrated a consistent interest in socio-political, scientific, and technical, and moral-ethical issues, depicting in his works the interconnection between politics, new technologies and morality. This research, using two novels by Ian McEwan, the dramatic tension of political, and scientific, and technical discourses is examined; the specifics of the intergenerational conflict in the novel “Saturday” and the peculiarities of the interaction between a person and artificial intelligence, an android, in the novel “Machines Like Me” are analysed. It has been established that issues in political life and scientific progress are inextricably linked to human moral and ethical values and directly affect the state of the world, shaping humanity's present and future. In the novel “Saturday,” through the prism of M. Bakhtin's anthropological idea of “coexistence” and Albert Camus's existentialist concept of metaphysical suicide, the intergenerational conflict of the novel, based on the worldview and psychological differences of the characters, is traced. The novel “Machines Like Me” immerses the reader in the topical issue of human interaction with humanoid robots, which in the artistic realization of Ian McEwan shakes up stereotypical ideas about the dangers of artificial intelligence, in particular about the negative consequences of human-robot cooperation, and instead reveals the global question of the imperfection of human nature and the lack of a moral and ethical foundation in modern man that might serve as a guide in the complex situation of absolute unpredictability of the consequences of ethically ambiguous scientific experiments. Using various narrative strategies (narration from the third person of a heterodiegetic narrator and the effects of improper-direct speech (“Saturday”) and from the first person of an autodiegetic narrator “Machines Like Me”)), exploiting the hybrid form of the novel and other poetic features of postmodern and metamodern modes of writing (intertextuality, ambiguity of novel titles and characters' surnames, playing with the reader, new psychologism, etc.), McEwan remains within the field of the English literary tradition, expressing the idea of the need for human improvement against the backdrop of the global challenges of the modern world.