Chinese And Western Classical Literature Of The War Narrative

War is a theme of history and literature. Geographical features formed the shape of civilization rudiments, which lead to various acts and different thought pattern in warfare. These voluntary and passive consequential thoughts about war circulated until nowadays.The interactive relationship between war patterns and culture tropism hides under the words of text. The successive history of the east and the west war, to a great degree, might be considered as derivatives of warfare concept. Although the appearance of culture looks dazzled, the logical links connecting with the core of culture are still traceable.The paper focuses on the narrative of war in the pre-Qin times and ancient Greek (8th Century - 3rd Century B.C.), analyze the culture and historical background of narrative text and theory, research Chinese war pattern in the early stage of state concept formation through the analysis of the elements in warfare records, explore the concept of war and relevant culture features, compare it with war culture in ancient Greek and explain the features concluded from Chinese war culture. Most of the former academic researches are restricted in the scope of military history or isolated culture events and phenomenon. The paper targets at breaking the boundary among literature, history and war research, contrast and compare the war pattern and culture tropism between the pre-Qin times and ancient Greek in the context of literary narrative and survey the unique features of Chinese war culture from a fresh standpoint.The narrative of war reflects military thoughts directly, and contains description and record of war acts. The connotative power induced the following series of links: abstract pattern (the narrative of wars) - deductive pattern (the description of wars) -fundamental pattern (the acts of wars) - abstract pattern (military thoughts). The narrative of war links the whole logical deduction progress. The elements in culture affect abstract pattern of wars, thereby form the deductive pattern of war and it aims to record and show the fundamental pattern of wars. Finally, the new culture elements grown from fundamental pattern formed new abstract pattern of wars. It is a continuous interactive links of circle. The wars in historical narrative are deductive results, which consists both historical and literary "truth".The first chapter outlines the culture roots where pre-Qin narrative of wars originated. The chapter begins from introduction of relevant institution, historical viewpoint and narrative features in the corresponding period, followed by the scholars'and philosophers'military viewpoints formed in those wars and the trace of the subsequent Confucius philosophers'thoughts. Thereby, the internal particularities in pre-Qin narrative of wars will be found out from these culture origins. The second chapter discusses the narrative of wars in ancient Greek and the formation of those particular histories about wars, for instance History of the Peloponnesian War, against its culture background, and provides meticulous analysis based upon the examples in the text records. The third chapter inspects the image expression and culture reasoning through female characters, language description in war and actions after victory and failure. Authors portrayed the depiction of the characters, words and acts through these three literary objects, from which it reflects the indiscernible culture tropism of the east and the west. The fourth chapter discourses several themes in narrative of wars including battles, tactics and strategies in pre-Qin and ancient Greek and compares and contrasts, on even ground, the practices in wars of both sides, therefore shows the interaction between war and culture. The chapter, as a conclusion of the dissertation, not only concludes the similarities and differences of war between pre-Qin China and ancient Greek but also summarizes the Chinese war features against western wars:the priority of moral reason, preferring stratagem to methodology, and get a victory before battle start.Valuing ruse and despising Methodologies based upon moral reason is the key feature of pre-Qin war culture, which relates with Chinese unique military and culture phenomenon. "Shi", Chinese style intellectual with practical ability, plays more important roles than professional soldiers in ancient Chinese society and military history. It is recorded in Chinese history that "Shi" as a major group of war leaders and participants, influenced the trend of Chinese history and formation of Chinese culture.