Ethical Reasoning through Conceptual Metaphor in Narrative Discourse

Abstract

This article investigates how conceptual metaphor makes ethical judgments available and how narrative discourse tests their adequacy. P. D. James’s The Children of Men remains the central text, read comparatively with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Hugh Howey’s Wool, and Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. A qualitative, scene-based method connects figurative expressions with source-domain inferences, narrative perspective, and consequences across each novel. James’s metaphors of decay and burden naturalize political resignation, while the movement from guardianship to command exposes the instability of protective authority. McCarthy’s recurring fire associates survival with moral continuity but requires correction through the child’s responses to strangers. Howey combines constriction and coffin imagery with deceptive visual experience, questioning whether apparent knowledge can justify collective obedience. Lynch’s metaphors of drowning and consumption communicate political vulnerability while risking the naturalization of organized violence. The comparison shows that ethical reasoning involves more than selecting an appropriate metaphor: it requires examining its distribution of agency, its exclusions, and its revision through narrative progression. The novels offer different means of challenging metaphorical inference, including internal contradiction, dialogue, material verification, and changes of scale. Their ethical achievement lies in making partial descriptions answerable to the lives they organize.