Chinese Narrative Analysis

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Swaying between life and death, forsaken by both, this trend of Chinese postmodernism that I discussed above is what I define an impressionist realism, a political fable with realistic mode registering the movements outside as a crucial elements of human experience, silhouetted by an absurd epilogue before the tragedy is understood. Narrative captures the transient through the eyes of the witnesses flashing upon the eyes the image of what they just saw. The tragedy of Chinese history borders the happenings of protagonist’s broken life, the tone of the narration alternates between the indifference of history and subjective elements of compassion, similar to historical fiction but different because here history is reinvented, desacralized …show more content…

Drama, collective and individual, covers the whole plot, we are offered a detailed description of tortures inflicted by the madness of the CR, we record the broken lives of those who survived, and we are given an insight of the destructive consequences of economic developments. But it’s not tragedy yet, there are fundamental conceptual elements missing. There is no catharsis for the protagonists, they are not allowed to receive final purification, even if at some stage of the narration their fate seem taking a positive turn in the end they always lose: Su Tong’s Madwoman is taken away to a sanatorium, Fugui and Dongliang are left alone with a pile of memories and mistakes to decode, Sun Guanglin kneels down at the side of life, Lin Hongs whose natural beauty motivates her innocence, ends up opening a bordello, Song Gangs-the pure face of time- is ultimately a victim of the market economy and his weaknesses . This is realism without salvation, a crude ostentation of that desolation, decadence, which, is one of the main traits of Chinese postmodern literature. There is not inevitability (ekkyklema), a reverse of fortune, an incident which gives start to a cause-effect plot, and there is not the intervention of a Deus ex machina, (usually a divinity in the Greek tragedy) to appeal

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