美国作家艾·巴·辛格的长篇小说《莫斯卡特一家》从多方面展现了19世纪初期,在传统思想和现代意识的碰撞下,犹太人所面临的伦理困境,凸显了伦理在犹太人生活中的核心价值。本文从文学伦理学批评视角出发,探讨了主人公阿萨从传统犹太伦理观中渐渐迷失的过程,他抛却正统犹太伦理思想;在重塑新的理性世俗伦理观的种种尝试下,一步步背离弥赛亚,最终沦陷在新旧伦理规约中而无法自拔。由于不断挑战伦理秩序,阿萨两次婚姻破裂、家庭身份缺失、社会身份持续错位,直至临近死亡。这一伦理悲剧渲染了伦理的力量,从而告诫世人任何破坏伦理秩序和伦理道德关系的行为必将遭受严厉的惩罚,背负无法挽回的代价。主人公阿萨在新旧伦理观支配下的矛盾情感和游移不定的道德立场,进一步揭示了其无视伦理秩序导致的悲剧命运不仅是个人的最终结局,更是犹太民族在传统伦理观遭到摒弃、新的伦理观尚未明晰确立的这一时期不可避免的困境。

In his novel The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer not only explores and discusses the ethical dilemma faced by Jewish community in the early 1900s, but highlights the core value of ethic in Jewish society as well. The literary text focuses on Jewish young man, Asa, who attempts to reconstruct the reasonable and secular ethics instead of his original traditional Jewish ethics, but loses his way in the confusion between the traditional and the new ethics with breaking ethical orders continually, ending up with his broken marriage and tragic destiny of death. Through the narration, Singer strengthens the power of ethic and warns people that any act of violating ethical orders and relations would be punished severely. This essay intends to focus on the ethical changes leading to Asa’s choices, analyzing his conflicting emotions and hesitating moral concerns under the struggle between the tradition and the newness from the perspective of ethical literary criticism. The paper decodes a set of ethical complexes and demonstrates Asa’s tragic fate as an epitome of the Jewish people who fail to reconstruct new ethical values in that period of time.