The Development Of First-person Narrative In Chinese Ancient Novels

The emergence and development of Chinese novel’s first-person narrative perspective was a slow process. This process was not only influenced by the translation of recent western novels, and the self-consciously changes and progress of the Chinese traditional classical novels also played an more important role. In the works of Chinese ancient novels, first-person narrative perspective emerged late, and the works of adopting this perspective was relatively less. Most of Chinese ancient novels adopted the third-person narrative perspective, so novels of first-person began to appear until to the the period of Tang legends, and in novels of Ming and Qing dynasty also had small amount of such works. The appearance of the first-person narrative perspective broke the omniscient novel model of Chinese ancient traditional single third-person perspective, and to explore the the literary value and artistic charming of this perspective’s appearance and mature, having a positive and profound academic significance for comprehensive understanding the narrative pattern and writing techniques of Chinese classical novels. However, the study of modern academics to the first-person narrative in Chinese classical novel is not deep, and only slightly mentioned in some treatise and literary works. Nowadays, research papers and research results are far few, and the relevant academic papers analyze the first-person narrative perspective only from the development of a few pieces of the classical novels in some stage or from some certain novels. This lacking of integrity, systematic and can’t thorough concretely reveals the changes of first-person narrative respective in the Chinese ancient novels, and can’t give out this narrative novels’ value and significance to the development of Chinese novels. Based on the analysis of theory characteristic, era characteristics, and cultural phenomenon of the first-person narrative, combining with the first-person stories of ancient Chinese works. This article explains the unique advantage of first-person narrative applied in classical novels and its development in the ancient novels.This article can be divided into five parts:First part is the introduction:a brief introduction of the exists of first-person narration in Chinese ancient novels, and then brings out the ancient works of first-person narration and the present research of it in modern academic, and last is a simple explain of the significance of the research of this article and its academic value.First chapter summaries the first-person narrative perspective, and explains the positioning and characteristics of this narrative.Second chapter specifically analysis the works of first-person narrative appearing in the Tang legends and novels of Ming and Qing dynasties, and combines the characteristics of the times and the social ideological trend, then to explore the first-person narrative style and artistic characteristics from the whole article.Third chapter discusses the significance of existence of the first-person narrative in the ancient novels, as well as the inheritance and development of this narrative in recent novels.The conclusion summarizes the features of first-person narrative in the development of Chinese ancient novels.