Probe Into Zhang Wei’s Saga Novel From A Multidimensional Perspective

This thesis, with Zhang Wei’s long novels as its research object, makes its main focus on the categorizing, analyzing, summarizing and examining of the novels’narrative characteristics, and compares his novels with many other contemporary classic novels to research on the basic features, narrative aesthetics and spiritual space of Zhang’s novel. This research is from four dimensions:writing resources, producing attitude, narrative strategies and spiritual implications. Then, it gets a summary on the unique experience Zhang’s novel can provide in terms of tradition and modern, history and reality, retreat and defiance, interest and meaning and so on.The Introduction part is an illustration of the thesis’s research object, research causes and the main result and condition of contemporary literary circle’s research on Zhang Wei’s novel writing. It makes clear the main and difficult problems the thesis is set to tackle and has given explanation on the significance of studying Zhang Wei’s novels.The first chapter, Integration and Upholding——Writing Resources of Zhang Wei’s Novel, mainly studies the writing resources of Zhang’s novel. This chapter first examines the influence of a region’s traditional culture on the cultural implications of Zhang’s novel. It analyzes the potential influence of regional culture on the historical taste, moral sense and awareness of preparing for the worst of Zhang’s novel. This analysis is from several aspects, such as the long existed cultural differences between Qi and Lu, varied choices of Confucianism, Taoism, Confucius, Mencius, Leader Huang and Lao Zi and going into and out of the secular world, and the cultural reflection on the declining of Lai and Qi states. Then, from reading classic literature, it analyzes the influence of classics in Chinese traditional literature on his poetic writing style, such as saints’hundred classics, The Book of Songs, The Songs of Chu, Tang poems and Song lyrics, and Ming and Qing novels. Also the affecting and making of his novel’s spiritual character by the humanitarian spirit of western literature especially Russian literature. It mainly narrates the cause of the phrase "Essence of Writing is in Delighting Heart", and its influence in the establishment of Zhang’s writing spirit:doubting and reflecting, warning and criticizing. In the end, with Zhang’s growing up and his life experiences, it illustrates the influence of childhood’s jungle memory, teen age’s wild land wandering and middle age’s self-relaxation on his choice of his novel’s motif, event, structure and mood.The second chapter, Defiance and Retreat——the Writing Attitude of Zhang Wei’s Novel, mainly analyzes the narrative attitude of Zhang Wei’s novel. Narrative spirit, narrative form, narrative ways are the scale to unveil the mystery of Zhang Wei’s novel writing. This chapter, from "alienation", the spiritual choice of Lu Xun’s "Defiance" literary circle, nowadays spiritual reflection, and spiritual exploration of restructuring history, is to illustrate the breakthrough of Zhang’s novel over the traditional realistic novels, and then recognizes the declining vitality of contemporary literature and the divine thought of going ultimate. Then, from novel’s narrative forms, it summarizes the demolition of "non-traditional text" narrative crisis by his "retreat" narrative, and this summarization is from three aspects:narrative mode, narrative writing type and narrative techniques. And he employs a lot of good narrative mode and techniques from Chinese classic literature to form his own "compatible narrative" novel writing type. In the end, it analyzes the cultural, mysterious and historical imagination, and categorizes narrative stands such as enlightening folk stands, poetic secular stands, classic and plain humane stands and so on, and activates dialects, ancient languages, wild local language, humorous metaphors and so on. All these aspects reflect the unique elite folk narrative feature of Zhang Wei’s novel.The third chapter, Intelligence and Poetics——The Narrative Strategy of Zhang Wei’s Novel, mainly analyzes the narrative strategy of Zhang Wei’s novel writing. There are three basic narrative strategies employed by Zhang, namely, absurd narration, intelligent narration and spatial narration. In this chapter, it first analyzes the absurd narration of Zhang’s novel and chooses three aspects——type establishing, perspective activating and function illustrating to analyze how Zhang has adopted the "mysterious", "transcendent" and "unrealistic" writing style so as to shake off the realistic, uniform and trendy writing style. Therefore, he can get close to the wild, unique and absurd deep reality. Then, it categorizes the irony narration, intertextual narration and metaphorical narration to analyze Zhang’s exaggerated, sharp, unique and humorous narrating style, and it points out that Zhang has used a humorous and light attitude to present audience with another truth of reality. Then, it uses Bakhtin’s spatial narrative theory and conversational theory and Chinese traditional novel’s narrative spatial forms, such as frame, box, block and chain, to analyze the establishing, the crossing and the categorizing of the novel’s narrative space, and to summarize basic characteristics of Zhang Wei’s spatial narration in his novel.The fourth chapter, Wandering and Plateau——The Spiritual Implications of Zhang Wei’s Novel, mainly analyzes the spiritual implications and ideological value of Zhang Wei’s novel. There are three sets of key words that can illustrate the spiritual implications of Zhang’s novel:walking and wandering, exploring and doubting, wild land and plateau. In this chapter, it first explores the ways of walking and wandering, and explains three basic ways of walking:forced escapees, voluntary walkers and the self-exiled. It illustrates how Zhang Wei has structured and formed his novel’s structural meaning, literary meaning and spiritual meaning with wandering, which is the basic behavioral style of mankind. Then, it explains how Zhang Wei explores and records historical truth from three aspects: exploring tribe’s long history, discovering legendary anecdotes and unveiling revolution’s mysteries. It witnesses and records the spiritual decline caused by secular temptations and hegemony centered on money and power to reveal the real condition of cities and villages after reform. Then, it explains in detail Zhang’s "Not believing" doubtful spirit, homogenous historical fatalism and the defiance of factualism to naturalism, summarizes and analyzes why Zhang Wei has made exploring and doubting the internal drive of his novel’s narration. In the end, this chapter categorizes two key spiritual images:wild land and plateau, and analyzes the changes and development of Zhang’s novel’s spiritual homeland. Then it explores the function of wild land and plateau and illustrates in detail and with emphasis Zhang’s thinking and criticizing of modern advance, defying and warning of economic globalization, and cleansing and recognizing of family’s spiritual blood line.The Conclusion part is a summary and recollection of the thesis’s research key points. It summarizes several key words that represent the value of Zhang’s novel, namely, interest and meaning, tradition and contemporary, retreat and defiance, wild land and plateau. And it gives objective narration and evaluation of the merits and limitations of Zhang’s novel in terms of narrative strategy, spiritual motif, aesthetic implications and ideological value.