Abstract: This paper probes into the origin, significance and problematic of narrative ethic criticism, and demonstrates narrative ethics can be approached from three aspects. Firstly, narration and ethics are indivisible in that there has been for a long time an intertwining and mutually generative relationship between them. Secondly, narration may be characterized to be moral or immoral as well as ordered or unordered, which means there exists non-ethical or even anti-ethical narration. Finally, narration itself may have ethical nature, and this nature is very likely to be under tension due to the possibility of constructing multiple value orders by way of narration. This paper maintains a rigorous distinction between narrative ethics criticism and conventional moral criticism and proposes some fundamental critical scales for narrative ethnic criticism in terms of critical grounds, approaches, perspectives and attitudes.

Key words: narrative ethics, narrative identity, boundary thinking, critical scale