Research On Characters In Laoshe's Narrative Work

Laoshe is a rather well known writer,who is famous for his humour,social criticism,realism,as well as his anti-Japanese literature.A myriad of characters appear in his work,some of them are heroes,some of them villains,majority of them are common people,many of them from the lowest classes of society.Laoshe is special among Chinese writers as he was influenced by many western wristers like Charles Dickens or Joseph Conrad.Changes in his work reflected changes in Chinese society throughout his life,that is why we could in a way call him a historian of sorts.As we already said through his work we can understand much about Chinese society of his time,however it would be a mistake to claim that depicting Chinese society was Laoshe's main goal when writing his work,as what makes his work so exceptional are his characters,and we only get to understand the society through these characters,as through them Laoshe presents the reader with his own insights,ideals,observations etc..These characters not only represent themselves,they often also represent a whole social class or occupation.Because of these reasons we believe that the most important element of Laoshe's work are indeed his characters.Our dissertation comprises six chapters,the first chapter is called Research on images of family members in Laoshe's work,here we conducted research on images of fathers and mothers,older and younger brothers,older and younger sisters,but also neighbours.The second chapter is Research on images of characters as a part of society(as ?bearers“ of an occupation),here we classified characters according to their occupation or role in society into categories like villagers,soldiers,teachers,students etc..Here we do not only focus on characters themselves but also on the way these characters are affected by their role in society or their occupation.Chapter three is called Contrasted characters in Laoshe's work,here we discuss groups of characters between which there is a sharp contrast,in Laoshe's work these characters are quite abundant,just for example we have heroes and villains,good and bad people,friends and foes etc.,here we also talk about neutral characters.Chapter four is called Other types of characters in Laoshe's narrative work.There are groups of characters that do not belong to any of the other chapters of our dissertation,but are still worth mentioning and so we decided to put them all in this single chapter.Research on ideology of characters in Laoshe's narrative work is the name of chapter five,here we focus on characters' values,how characters change along with the era and here we also discuss Laoshe's own values.When doing reasearch on a work of literature,although in our case the focus is on characters,we cannot completely ignore the elements of art in it,hence the final sixth chapter of our work is Research on ?art“ in Laoshe's characters.At first glance at these six chapters it is obvious that some characters will appear in more than one categories,that is because one of the reasons why we wrote this dissertation was to look at and understand Laoshe's characters from different points of view,as we believe that if we truly want to understand a character we can not only look at how they are at home,but also how they act as a part of society,how they think,and where possible we also need to view them as polar differences,for if there was no black there would be no white and vice versa,through comparison of contrasts we can better understand these characters and their traits.