New-Atheism and the Question of Morality in Contemporary English Prose
New-Atheism and the Question of Morality in Contemporary English Prose

Summary/Abstract: The current article argues that eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century evolutionary biology and the twentieth-century scientific positivism define the creative mind of the fiction of our age. This New-atheism borrows a lot from its ancestral philosophies going back all the way to the Greek classical era as well. God is taken by the New-atheists as something more ‘dangerous’ than atheists of the past. According to the new-atheists, a bigger story than that of God’s is in the offing all around us and it is our human responsibility to let not God interfere in our understanding of that story. Ian McEwan’s is a prime example as his novels are strictly linked to the discourses of New-Atheism and Postmodernism. McEwan’s works illustrate the sense of being trapped in the web of the age of information where the divine gift of language is disseminated and there is no way out from the cultural and political maze of the 21st century. McEwan sees civilization as various strains which are tied together through an unnatural process. Literature of the day has further received a blow at the hands of yellow journalism as well. A writer of caliber needs to avoid journalistic stereotypes and newspaper clips designed to portray purposefully a particular nation in a particular complexion. The present article discusses the possible impact of journalistic trends on McEwan’s writings. McEwan’s efforts in connecting the existing instabilities with the action of the novel constitute the main source of interest in his art. There is a moral sense behind all the anger and frustration in his works, but he understands the system’s flaws so vaguely that the novel soon turns into a voice of condemnation of whatever is not in agreement with the ideologue of McEwan.

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