Title: Identity Dilemma and Ethical Choices in the South African Play Blood Knot

Abstract: Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot takes the protagonist’s return home as its central narrative trajectory, tracing the search for identity experienced by colored individuals under South Africa’s apartheid system. After transgressing imposed racial and social boundaries, the protagonist becomes entangled in a profound crisis of identity and an acute ethical dilemma. This predicament arises from the apartheid regime’s disruption of familial relations and foregrounds the intense conflict between kinship-based ethics and racially constructed moral codes. The protagonist’s final decision to return home thus constitutes a critical ethical choice through which he reconsiders his dual ethical identities, revealing the deep interconnection between identity formation and family ethics. From this perspective, the narrative configuration of homecoming and the reconstruction of a family community not only awakens racial consciousness among colored subjects but also compels a reengagement with cultural origins, thereby offering a potential path beyond a long-standing condition of identity impasse.

Keywords: Athol Fugard, Blood Knot, identity dilemma, family community, ethical choice

Authors: Jian Huang, Professor, School of Foreign Studies, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China; Jingyi Zhang, School of Foreign Studies, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.04.010