Spiritual View At The Turn Of The Century:

The Village of Gao is a story about a provincial university professor Gao Zilu returning his hometown to participate in the memorial ceremony of his dead father, together with his new wife Xixia. Within one month, the narrator in the novel constantly shifts his narrative point of view mainly between Xixia and Zilu, the two main characters. When Gao Zilu, the man who is familiar with this environment and Xixia, the woman who has no idea about such an environment, focused on the same object or event, they have implicitly or explicitly displayed their respective cognitive difference and encountered opposition from each other; as a result, one side of the thought will cause the other side to think over those issues. The relative interaction between ideas crash and discourse communication field actually involves the narrative space which constitutes a narrative context. In the complicated context of polyphonic narrative, how the narrator makes Xixia and Zilu to see and what they see, become the focus of this dissertation.Whether it is color narrative, "harem" narrative, mysterious narrative, the urban-rural narrative or the past-present narrative, they all demonstrate particular views from different perspectives. What lies behind the different views from Xixia and Zilu, is their respective personal history. But their narratives lead to a significant topic of existence by different routes:the two main narrative points of view constantly pursue the spiritual journey and go back to the origin of the personal history, the family of Gao, the village of Gao and the Chinese nation and search for the truth of existence and explain where to go.If we try to explain a variety of events in the same story from different points of view, this story may be revised constantly and be directed towards various possibilities which might offer more open-ended answers with much richer interpretation space. In consequence, a simple, pure and thin story becomes rich, dense, deep, and obscure. The original aspect of life and its abundance are highlighted. Every rereading of the text, the miscellaneous narrative and cultural depth will bring readers new feelings, new discoveries, new associations and new interpretations. This narrative, close to the original life state, is seemingly "disorder", "without skills" and "without structure", but that shows the author's own ingenuity. The deliberate pursuit of narrative strategy is abandoned. Therefore, the novel is able to go into the depths of such narrative. An intricate deep narrative structure of text is built up with the help of some multiple-idea lines such as culture balance, paradox discourse, binary opposition and an organic whole with two aspects. Such narrative strategy in the novel reflects a kind of trans-narrative attitude.Miscellaneous subjects, complex semantic and close-to-life presentation in the novel The Village of Gao are not highly evaluated by many critics. With shame and anger, the main character—Zilu, fled from his Waterloo. Another main character—Xixia is tempted by the culture and the history of the village of Gao. The people in the novel are a group of failures, such as the foreign investor—Wang Wenlong, the local villagers—Juwa and Suhong, "The first reformer" Cai Laohei, including the two protagonists Zilu and Xixia. Can the village of Gao, where there's not even one winner, transcend itself? When will it transcend itself? And how? Those short people whose family name is Gao live there for hundreds of years. How far do they leave from the modern civilization? How many villages of Gao spread in today's China? From language, thought to the way of life, how much collective ancestral heritage of the villagers of Gao must modern civilization train carry? As a cultural parable, can the Village Gao be called the spiritual symbol of Chinese inland township at the turn of the century? Obviously, there are many valuable explorations and revelations in this spiritual region, such as the place, Baiyun Qiu which hides its evil face and no one can experience in the novel. All of those valuable discoveries reveal the charm of the whole story The village of Gao which turns out to be a spiritual gift for the history and the future.