ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 highlights the “irrationality” that ran through Han’s autobiographical series, depicting the unreasonableness of her time and the lost humanity. This chapter discusses the development, debates, and nature of autobiography as a literary genre. It also employs an allegory in ethical literary criticism (ELC), illustrating that like a Sphinx that has lost her human head, history witnesses dark spots in which human society gives way to group aggression and animalistic conduct instead of adherence to civility. Ethics define the principles and boundaries of human behaviours and interactions between people. In the absence of rationality and ethics, human society will naturally spiral down to unruliness and chaos. Han Suyin’s autobiographical accounts, which call for the “way of Man” over the “way of the beast,” as delineated in her autobiography, expound her memories of an era when foreignness was deadly, and it paid to commit the forbidden. Han Suyin’s exposition on the theme of irrationality and the query of reasonableness is a timeless truth.
