Family Ethics in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You

DOI

10.2991/iccese-18.2018.105How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Celeste Ng; Everything I Never Told You; family ethics

Abstract

Chinese American writer Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You penetrates into the educational crisis in a mixed-race family by highlighting the sense of alienation, frustration and depression resulting from distorted family ethics. This paper mainly analyzes the ethical issues in the novel from the perspectives of conjugal ethics, parent-child ethics and sibling ethics. According to Hegel, conjugal ethics requires both parties’ unification of personality, and their acknowledgement of the entitativity of a family, while James and Marilyn failed to do so. Apart from that, James’ estrangement from the children and Marilyn’s high expectations for Lydia made them suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and gave rise to Lydia’s death. Moreover, the issues of excessive attachment, escapism and invisibility aroused by siblings obstruct a normal intersubjectivity. Celeste Ng thus underscores the significance of wholesome family ethics for children’s growth and cultivation.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yuan Shen
AU  - Ting Yang
PY  - 2018/03
DA  - 2018/03
TI  - Family Ethics in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Culture, Education and Economic Development of Modern Society (ICCESE 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 453
EP  - 458
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iccese-18.2018.105
DO  - 10.2991/iccese-18.2018.105
ID  - Shen2018/03
ER  -