A Dialogical Study On War Trash From The Polyphonic Perspective

Ha Jin is the first Chinese writer who has won both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has been writing in English since 1990s, and has published fifteen works successively. Ha Jin is quite popular among American literature and welcomed by American readers. However, "Ha Jin" is not a household word in China, and some of his works are not published. Based on Barhktin’s Dialogue Theory, this thesis aims to analyze three kinds of dialogues in War Trash:the dialogues among characters, the dialogues within the protagonist, and the dialogues between the author and the characters.There are five chapters in this thesis. The first chapter gives a brief introduction to Ha Jin, his masterpiece, the studies at home and abroad and the focus and structure of the thesis. The second chapter mainly focuses on the dialogues among the characters, of which the essence is an ideological battleground. Wang Yong, the advocate of Three Principles of the People, and Pei Shan, the loyal adherent of the Communist tried to persuade as many POWs (prisoner of war) as possible to side with their camps, thus taking brutal actions. Yu Yuan, a non-party personage, was involved in the ideological battle and struggled desperately to survive. The third chapter deals with the dialogues within the protagonist, whose essence is the conflicts within Yu Yuan. Inspired by bis patriotic love to the nation, Yu Yuan was willing to go to the front to defend his country; but when captured, he was eager to go back home to fulfill his filial duty to his mother. While involved in the life-and-death ideological battlefield, he was fed up with the fracas. His yearning for freedom grew deeper and deeper. Chapter Four focuses on the dialogues between the author and the characters. In the counterpoints on the choice of camps, both Ha Jin and Yu Yuan believed that the real freedom lay outside China, in a third place. In the counterpoints on the choice of cultures, Yu Yuan showed his reference to the humanity that the Christianity advocated, while Ha Jin wandered between Chinese culture and American culture. In the counterpoints on the choice of ethical cultures, Yu Yuan felt betrayed and used by his country; Ha Jin even accused the country of betraying the individual. Both Yu Yuan and Ha Jin sided with the Individualism which emphasizes more on personal right and freedom. Then it comes to the conclusion that War Trash is significant, which draws people’s attention and sympathy to the POWs. However, the suffering of the POWs is a special event in a special time of history. Ha Jin, as an immigrant writer who has been influenced by and sided with the western culture, is not appropriate to stand as a spokesman for Chinese people.