This article concentrates on the issue of ethics in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners (2007), and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951). The study of ethics will not be tackled from a broad perspective of the terms. It will be highlighted and limited to the representation of morality in these novels. Therefore, morality is going to be treated in the light of its negative aspects. The representation of morality is conveyed by the author’s depiction of how ethics deteriorates at the expense of immoral affairs. Thus, three immoral representations are going to be studied. First, the immoral treatment of other characters at the hand of the protagonist is the immoral aspect of Rushdie’s Shame. Second, the marginalization of the blacks is the immoral peculiarity in Phillips’s Foreigners. The blacks suffer from certain marginalization which makes them inferior to their white counterparts. Third, the immoral and prohibited relationships between the protagonist and other women are going to be the immoral issue in Greene’s The End of the Affair. The analysis of these three immoral issues will be carried out by providing a textual analysis of the selected works’ main characters and their interactions with other minor characters. Key Words: Ethics, Immorality, Marginalization, Morality, Society 1. Introduction Human ethics and morality is one of the most demanding issues in modern societies. They are very interesting to distinguish one nation from the other nations because they represent their inherited behaviors. Morality embodies the human beings’ behavioral attitudes towards each other. It helps critics to examine any society ethical manners in terms of the behaviors in which the society is involved. Accordingly, ethics is a determining factor about the advancement or retardation of any society. The role of ethics, in this case, is to specify the extent to which morality can spread in any nation. Ethical and moral characteristics are the defining features of the social traditions whether traditional or new accepted in human communities. In some cases, the measurement of any morality or ethics could be limited the international image of that society. Therefore, the ethical issues are very important to study the behavioral aspects of any society (De Noody 15). However, the social ethics or morality might be destructive. They do not contribute any advancement to the society in which they grow up. Negative ethics and morality have nothing to do the people who practice them. They are the representative peculiarity of any negative society. They go against the utopian understanding of good manners. Human beings, therefore, limit and express their morality and ethics in their national limitations. Ethics and morality are somewhat relative. They could be negative or positive according to the country or society where they arise. Here, morality is dependent on its people. The purpose of this study is to discuss the negative morality in Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners, and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. In Shame, the negative morality and ethics will be discussed in terms of the immorality which takes place in the novel. In Foreigners, they will be highlighted in terms of marginalization practiced against the blacks in the novel. In The End of the Affair, they are going to be discussed in terms of flagrant immoral relationship between the protagonist and other women. 2. Killings in Shame Shame (1983) is a story that focuses on a character that is against women in his views towards women.
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Rushdie starts the novel by introducing the spatial setting. Rushdie sets the novel on a border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He focuses the story on three sisters who raise a son named Omar Khayyam. They instill confidence in Omar and instruct him not to feel shame, the equivalent of the word ‘sharam’ in Arabic. Because of this, Omar becomes sexist as well as misogynistic in his relations with females. Rushdie inserts conflict into the narrative when another character is suspicious of Omar and his predilection towards immoral life. However, the theme of immorality is second to the theme of shame in the novel, for it is felt in another character. One of the characters, who is twin to another, takes on the shame of the world and becomes a ‘Beast’ incarnate. Omar marries her much to his demise. By the end of Shame, Sufiya, Omar’s wife, beheads him. The killing scenes
Rushdie starts the novel by introducing the spatial setting. Rushdie sets the novel on a border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He focuses the story on three sisters who raise a son named Omar Khayyam. They instill confidence in Omar and instruct him not to feel shame, the equivalent of the word ‘sharam’ in Arabic. Because of this, Omar becomes sexist as well as misogynistic in his relations with females. Rushdie inserts conflict into the narrative when another character is suspicious of Omar and his predilection towards immoral life. However, the theme of immorality is second to the theme of shame in the novel, for it is felt in another character. One of the characters, who is twin to another, takes on the shame of the world and becomes a ‘Beast’ incarnate. Omar marries her much to his demise. By the end of Shame, Sufiya, Omar’s wife, beheads him. The killing scenes